pancake's questions

Currently I'm having trouble with a server running Magento, it's unbelievably slow.

It's a VPS with a few Magento installations on it used for development, so I'm the only one using them. When I do 4 request all 2 seconds after each other I'm finished in 10 seconds. Slow, but still within the limits of my patience. When I do 4 "concurrent" requests, however (opening 4 tabs in a row, very quickly) all four cores go to 100% and stay there for like a minute.

How is this possible?

I know that there are a lot of possibilities here, so any tips on how to make an Apache/PHP server go faster are also welcome.

It used to go a lot faster before, and I've also tried APC, but it kept causing problems (PHP errors, something with memory pools) so I've disabled it.

By the way, the Magento cache is off and compiling is also off. I know this makes Magento slower than usual, but I don't think a 60 second response time is normal for any Magento installation.

Virtual hardware:
4 Cores and 4096MB RAM
Swap is never used (checked with htop) 100GB disk space, of which 10% is in use

Software:
Debian 6 DirectAdmin and apache custombuild PHP 5.2.17 (CLI)

If you need more info, please tell me how to get it, because I probably don't know how. I do know how to use the command line in linux and the usage of quite a few commands, but my experience with managing a server is limited.

I'm trying to build a linux box that will run without a monitor or keyboard, runs Ubuntu server, will go into suspend after a certain amount of time and is able to be woken up through network communication. Most of it is already in working order, except for the Wake-on-LAN part.

By the way, my computer is very old (bought it in 2002).

Some relevant info (I hope):

NIC: RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (Realtek).

Motherboard: SiS-645 (vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.)

Award BIOS capabilities (according to lshw):

isa pci pnp apm upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy360 int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb agp ls120boot zipboot netboot

Off course I activated the WakeOnRing/WakeOnLan (as it's called on my Award BIOS) setting, as well as some setting called PME or something.

output from $ sudo ethtool eth0:

Settings for eth0:
    Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
    Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                            100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
    Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
    Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                            100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
    Advertised pause frame use: No
    Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
    Link partner advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                                         100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
    Link partner advertised pause frame use: No
    Link partner advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
    Speed: 100Mb/s
    Duplex: Full
    Port: MII
    PHYAD: 32
    Transceiver: internal
    Auto-negotiation: on
    Supports Wake-on: pumbg
    Wake-on: d
    Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
    Link detected: yes

So obviously it's not working because it's on the 'd' setting. So I run the command:

$ sudo ethtool -s eth0 wol g

But with NO effect. I've tried all combinations..

-- EDIT --

Just to be clear: when I run ethtool eth0 after this last command again, the output still says 'd' at "Wake-on". Disabling the WakeOnLan function in the BIOS also has no effect on the situation whatsoever by the way, if that's enlightening in any way.

-- EDIT --

I've tried lots of time, to just wake it up using a magic packet, but (as can be expected with ethtool's output) it's not working.

Here's the eth0-part of the output from $ sudo lshw:

id:           network:1
description:  Ethernet interface
product:      RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+
vendor:       Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
physical id:  c
bus info:     pci@0000:00:0c.0
logical name: eth0
version:      10
serial:       00:11:22:33:44:55
size:         100MB/s
capacity:     100MB/s
width:        32 bits
clock:        33MHz
capabilities: bus_master ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd
              autonegotiation
configuration:  
    autonegotiation = on
    broadcast       = yes
    driver          = 8139too
    driverversion   = 0.9.28
    duplex          = full
    ip              = 192.168.0.20
    latency         = 32
    link            = yes
    maxlatency      = 64
    mingnt          = 32
    multicast       = yes
    port            = MII
    speed           = 100MB/s
    resources:      irq : 11
                    ioport : e400(size=256)
                    memory : ee003000-ee0030ff

I do not have a cable running from my network card to my motherboard and I don't see any 3-pin connector. I could be wrong though, if anyone with the same card says different I'll be sure to check again.

So, if ANYONE knows how I can solve this problem, or convince me that without a different network card, motherboard or computer I'm pretty much screwed, please tell me!

Thanks in advance.

I installed Ubuntu 10.10 Server on a very old computer (bought it in 2002), but it won't boot. It tells me it can't find the root mount volume by it's UUID and also gives me the follwing type of error:

Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxx does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

After which it gives me a initramfs prompt. I've searched everywhere and I've found a lot of different solutions (editing my grub settings to NOT use a UUID but /dev/sda1 instead, this is infact the partition on which the installation resides)

I currently don't have acces to a keyboard or a monitor, but I'm doing everything via a LiveCD which has SSH enabled by default, so I can perform administrative tasks on the computer. The installation also should have SSH installed, so I can enter it through the network as soon as it's booted sucesfully. I also found a way to see what disks a computer has installed listed by their UUID, namely the following:

$ ls /dev/disk/by-uuid

Which I thought was an awesome way to check if the UUID which it was looking for was also in the grub settings. I am however getting a bus error when I try this command. Any idea why this is?

I also ran smartctl to check the disks for errors (there are two disks) the one with the installation on it does not report any errors, the one that doesn't does report errors, but I don't think this should be a problem. Should it?

Also I've tried setting GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true by doing the following:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/hdd
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/hdd
$ sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/hdd/proc
$ sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/hdd/dev
$ sudo mount -- bind /sys /mnt/hdd/sys
$ sudo chroot /mnt/hdd
# vim /etc/default/grub
 -- editing the grub file --
# update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic-pae
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic-pae
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
 -- exit; etc --

....probably because I'm totally stupid but totally desperate to get this system working from the hard drive. And it didn't help.

If anyone has any pointers, please don't hesitate. Thank you.

-- EDIT: here's my ouput from fdisk --

user@host:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0007b4bd

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        4661    37431296   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            4661        4866     1648641    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            4661        4866     1648640   82  Linux swap / Solaris

I also tried to update the initramfs, (this place gave me an impression it might be a good idea, even though I have a single-boot system and this is a fresh install). I did it pretty much the same way I changed the grub settings. Thanks for your replies. I'm just going to take out the second hard drive altogether, as I don't have access to my BIOS settings without a keyboard (or monitor). Tomorrow I'm getting those, to make things way less difficult.