File transfers are slow and take 100% of CPU

stringZ · 11-29-2008, 01:28 PM

Hey there,

Recently I've noticed that there is a little problem with file transfers on one of my servers. It's Pentium I (MMX, 233MHz) thus it has never been rapidly fast, but used to be operate at ~6MB/s on LAN. Now it's hardly ~2MB/s. Few days ago I've upgraded to the latest available stable kernel, 2.6.27.7 from 2.4.36. Some things are faster (i.e. mplayer in XFree86), but this seems to be not one of them. I'm not sure if this issue has anything to to with the kernel upgrade.

I use proftpd for file transfers:

Code:

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
7360 stringz   20   0  4144 2020 1380 R 87.6  1.6   2:58.89 proftpd

Also tried vsftpd, same results in `top` and a dmesg warning:

Code:

warning: `vsftpd' uses 32-bit capabilities (legacy support in use)

What does this mean?
Has anyone had this?

Before you ask: DMA is ENABLED:

Code:

# hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 multcount    = 16 (on)
 IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 geometry     = 26310/16/63, sectors = 26520480, start = 0

Thanks in advance
stringZ

Junior Hacker · 11-30-2008, 01:27 AM

There must be a back country road around you somewhere with a steep slope where you can just stop, reach over and open the passenger door and kick this computer as hard as you can.

stringZ · 12-05-2008, 03:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Junior Hacker

There must be a back country road around you somewhere with a steep slope where you can just stop, reach over and open the passenger door and kick this computer as hard as you can.

I'd leave this kind of constructive attitude for those who use Windows :P

stringZ · 12-07-2008, 07:35 AM

I've spent a little time figuring this out but still don't have any idea, gathered some more information, though.

Further informations:

I generated a test file (100 MB) using the following command..

Code:

dd dd if=/dev/urandom of=test bs=1M count=100

.. and tried to fetch it (on LAN) using the mentioned vsftpd.

`top` results (2.6.27.7)

Code:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 2658 stringz   20   0  3200  848  668 R 90.2  0.7   0:05.86 vsftpd

(received at 6577 K/s)

and a warning message in `dmesg`...

Code:

warning: `vsftpd' uses 32-bit capabilities (legacy support in use)

`top` results (2.4.36)

Code:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 1493 stringz   20   0  1540 1540 1412 R 85.7  1.2   0:28.18 vsftpd

(received at 4745 K/s) and no warning messages at all.

What is this?????