[CentOS] CentOS 4.4-IBM Netvista Performace Problems, help needed.

Mon Feb 19 02:01:41 UTC 2007
Thomas Dukes <tdukes at sc.rr.com>

Don't know if this related but I have a similar problem as well on my
NetVista 2.53 Ghz.  However, it seems to be kernel related.  I can run
2.6.9-34.0.2 with no problems.  Any kernel after this and I experience the
similar problems as you.  Sorry I can't help but just letting you know
you're not alone.  I have the 'latest' bios installed as well.

-Eddie 

-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf
Of Chuck Mattern
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 8:53 AM
To: centos at centos.org
Subject: [CentOS] CentOS 4.4-IBM Netvista Performace Problems, help needed.

I've got an odd situation that I need some advise on.  I have two computers
that I am planning to use as a cluster.  I initially started with some left
over Compaq Presairos with 667MHz CPUs.  I loaded CentOS
4.3 and later updated to 4.4.  Things ran normally, albeit slowly.  I had an
opportunity to upgrade to a pair of IBM Netvistas with 2.26 GHz CPUs, I did
this by transferring the 160GB Western Digital IDE disks and NICs but did
not re-install the OS, just migrated the disks.  Since then they have had
the following symptoms:

-Systems frequently boot faster than the disks can be spun up and have to be
soft booted to recognize and boot from the disks.

-Systems will bog down critically after approximately 24 hours loosing
system time at an increasing rate, ofrr instance a for loop that runs date,
hwclock ans then sleeps for 10 minutes will show time in sync for the first
few hours then the system time will begin to fall behind at an increasing
rate, after 24 hours the system time essentially stops elapsing.  It almost
feels like the box has trouble processing interrupts.  Once it gets to this
state performance becomes very sluggish, for instance top will take up to 90
seconds to display it's first screen and will not update on it's own, only
when Enter is depressed.  At times top will show 0's across the utilization
line for everything including idle.  I have gone as far as to boot one of
the boxes into single user mode and run the date/hwclock loop and even in
that state the system will bog down and gradually stop elapsing time 
after 18-24 hours.   Even shutting down is impacted.  A reboot will take 
well over an hour to process.

I had a copy of Ubuntu on my desk and have booted into that distro from cd
and it passes the date/hwclock test (actually lost 2 seconds over a
24 hour period but I can live with that via ntp).  I'm downloading a copy of
the CentOS live 4.4 cd and will try this with that as well but at this time
does anyone see that this could be something other than a disk
incompatibility with the newer systems?  Should I try re-installing?  If it
is the disks, any thoughts on something I could try to avoid buying new
disks (I have tried setting the BIOS to both the high performance and legacy
disk modes (not entirely sure what's behind that IBMism)).

Regards,
Chuck
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