Too much network activity?

[David Groos]

Seeing Jim's e-mail about his computers being slow to log on is motivating
me to re-post to this previous post.  I'll repeat that since the last few
weeks, students have to wait maybe 2-4 minutes for their log on process to
finish.  I don't think it's worse in the afternoon though--students are less
patient at that time it seems.

I haven't added new software to my LTSP server except for regular updates.
I've had System Monitor on the last week a good bit.  2 things draw my
attention, the first I already mentioned that there is a lot of network
activity even when only 1 TC is booted.  The other is that the 4 CPU's seem
to be maxing out for a few seconds then go to around 60-70% about for 5-10
seconds, then again max out for a few seconds.  When they peg at 100% it
appears that's when another TC or 2 will get further logged in.  I'm not
sure about how much logging in happens during that maxing out period, but
that is when the logging in process seems to get furthered.

I went to the logs, looked at a few but didn't know where to look and
nothing really jumped out to me.  Any thoughts about how to further
troubleshoot this?  Might be related to Jim's TC problems, too, anyone else
experiencing this?

Thanks,
David

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 8:34 AM, David Groos <djgroos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm running 18 old pentium 4's as thin clients with a 4 processor (2 dual
> core Xeon 2.8 GHz), RAID setup, 2 NICs, a 100 MB to the building and a 1000
> MB NIC going to the switch which has then has 100 MB going to the clients.
> It has 3 GB of RAM.  I'm running Jaunty.
>
> So, even with just 1 client signed in (running System monitor) the baseline
> for the Network is about 3.2 MiB/s.  Then, every 42 to 43 seconds, over a 2
> second period the activity spikes to about 6.1 MiB/s.  This is like
> clockwork.  Of course, when more people sign in the activity climbs a good
> bit higher.
>
> I don't remember this much network activity before about 2-3 weeks ago.  Is
> this normal?  Seems logging in is slower, maybe especially in the
> afternoon?  Hard to pin that one down.
>
> Anyway, is this background speed normal?  Thanks,
>
> David
>
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