[techtalk] Benchmarking, Bandwidth, server speed

Michelle Murrain mpm at norwottuck.com
Tue May 15 16:38:33 EST 2001


Hi folks,

I'm trying to solve a mystery, and at the same time, figure out good metrics 
to determine our server speed, network speed, capacity, etc.

One database-driven page in particular loads *extremely* slowly (like, 
minutes), from several computers in the client's office. I've NEVER had the 
page load anywhere near that slowly from within our network (where the server 
resides) or remotely (like at home, which is on a cable modem connection - 
but via a totally different network than the DSL that work is on).  The 
client has a high-speed connection. (the strange part is that it appears that 
it is one page in particular, and that there are other pages that have just 
as much info, but load much faster - I'm not sure what's up there.)

We need, in general to understand how good our server/network/internet 
connection is working.

We're running mrtg, and find that theoretically, our bandwidth is never 
anywhere near the theoretical capacity that we pay for. 

First, are there programs which can give you the "cieling" bandwidth of your 
network - the real speed that you've got?

I'm learning about benchmarking perl code (which is the back-end programming 
language that we use) and I know that there are definitely things I need to 
do to improve speed there.  As well, we use PostgreSQL, which is slower than 
MySQL, but not that much slower - I don't think that's the problem. 

How can you test the capacity of a server to handle concurrent sessions, etc.?
(BTW, in general, we run Debian Linux, Postgres, apache and perl)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Michelle
-- 
------------
Michelle Murrain, Ph.D.
President
Norwottuck Technology Resources
mpm at norwottuck.com
http://www.norwottuck.com




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