Topic: Lagging issues

[Royd]

The issue is the Server/gateway server is causing a lag in on-line games every 5 to 10 minutes . The games are actually running on the other PC.  When the lag hits you can see it in the other PCs (2) also but they are not running on-line games so it doesn't really matter for them. I am only using the gateway side of the server nothing else. I am 95 % sure it's a software related issue in SME. It's not the cable modem as I have connected directly to the cable modem and the lag disappears. It's not the RJ45 cables I have replaced those. I have changed the hub to a switch. I changed the network cards to 3Coms and looked at the errors and there are none. It’s running on a Compaq Deskpro EN Pentium III with 384 ram.
I thought I would start shutting down applications to see if I could narrow the field but being a new to Linux well you know how it is when you have this large learning curve. I tried to shut down the virus checking but at this stage I can’t seem to do that properly and had to rebuild the server from scratch, not a problem, so easy and fast compared to a windows install. There is only one thing I think it could be other than the software is the ram, do I need to boost it up. Any ideas?

[zatnikatel]

when you say lag is the server only doing the internet connection or is it a game server as well a dedicated server for the games mind you the spec's of the server is a little low what type of online game is it games like ut2004 doom3 quake4 counter strike
if you have a monitor on the server can you login as root and type the word top and have a look at how much ram is in use and the cpu load and do plenty of online gaming
would look like this to quite out of the top command hit q on the keyboard
seeing you are new to linux use a keyboard and monitor putty on window is a little bit harder to get to the shell as you have to enable remote access and that leaves you system open to hackers

top - 21:37:04 up 1 day, 18:51,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 118 total,   1 running, 117 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  3.7%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 95.4%id,  0.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1035324k total,   999300k used,    36024k free,   127816k buffers
Swap:  2562328k total,      168k used,  2562160k free,   457508k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    1 root      15   0  2044  628  540 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.36 init
    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.63 ksoftirqd/0
    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.17 events/0
    6 root      12  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
    7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
   10 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.14 kblockd/0
   11 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
   93 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cqueue/0
   96 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khubd
   98 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kseriod
  157 root      25   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 pdflush
  158 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.40 pdflush
  159 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.80 kswapd0
  160 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  322 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kpsmoused

[imcintyre]

Royd;

As I was reading your post, it sounded very similiar to http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=40313.0. It might be useful to read it all as some of the troubleshooting tips are useful. The colasoft real time ping tool was useful to me in that it allowed visual  confirmation that a slow down occurred and assigning an event/cause. The executive summary I think is that the upload was getting saturated by some seemingly innocent task and temporarily messed up everyone's access. There was also some insinuation that Cable speeds might not be all that is claimed.

I have used the same compaq model with 866 Mhz processor as server gateway but had added more memory. Going from my memory the unit has 3 slots for pc100/133 memory and I think I had 3X256 installed and it was ok. I didn't do online gaming however.

You may want to consider installing SME7admin on your SME machine. It allows monitoring of cpu, memory, network, and disk access/performance from Server-Manager.

Hope this helps

[raem]

Royd

I tried to shut down the virus checking but at this stage I can’t seem to do that properly...

You would do that in server manager, disable Email message scanning in the Email panel, and disable system wide virus scanning in the AntiVirus panel.
Nothing hard about doing that.

[Royd]

Hi All
I decided to build a PC with the better specs. So I built a AMD 1041mhz and 1 gb of ram. The server is only running an internet connection not running Battlefield 2142,BF2 and COD4 on the server. So now I have plenty of ram free 758896k, cpu .3% us. I shut down the virus scanning and that did not make any difference to the lagging.
Where do I go know?

[zatnikatel]

so since you have a new server how often does it happen now how many people are playing now at one time on the connection i know that cable can have lame upload speeds you can also try using a static ip address on the PC'S and also try using the DNS from your isp rather than the SME gateway setup i have played online with SME in server and gateway mode with 2 people and it ran very well no lag at all
this is just somthing to try i don't know if it will work

Don't know which country you are from i can only tell you with Australian cable how well it worked
has this always been the case or has it just started and is anyone downloading large files while you are playing

[Royd]

Hi
I am already using static Ip. It has always done the lagging but I only change to a Linux server in the last couple weeks. When you say "try using the DNS from your isp rather than the SME gateway setup" what do you mean. Do I add the dns into the corporate settings? I am from New Zealand and we have a great connection. When I plug the PC with the games installed on directly into the cable modem all is fine.

[zatnikatel]

under network setting in windows were you put the static ip at the bottom were it say use the following DNS server addresses put in your ISP DNS servers put both in preferred DNS and Alternate DNS server in

[Royd]

Sorry I should have been a bit more specific. Yes the windows machines have that settings and on the SME Server I have it to resolve Internet DNS Server.

[zatnikatel]

now that is strange you should not have any lag what so ever i used the same setting and even hosted a ut2004 server on the SME box with no problem with 10 player 2 on the lan and 8 for other people from other countries and it ran with no lag at all that was with cable out here in australia
when you are not playing games do you get any problems with lag and when it lags out is there any hard disk activity on the sme box 

[Royd]

I haven't noticed any lagging under normal use. What would be the best manner in monitoring the hard drive activity of the server? Top?

[raem]

Royd

What would be the best manner in monitoring the hard drive activity of the server? Top?

You were advised that 2 days ago, what are you waiting for.
Also use
htop

There are many other tools you could use/need to use to find out what it happening, but looking at how busy your server is, will be a good place to start

another tool
iptraf

You need to find out the problem in order to fix it.

[zatnikatel]

Royd

You were advised that 2 days ago, what are you waiting for.
Also use
htop

There are many other tools you could use/need to use to find out what it happening, but looking at how busy your server is, will be a good place to start

another tool
iptraf

You need to find out the problem in order to fix it.

I total agree woth RayMitchell use those tools to check to see what is going on also wireshark is a good tool as well also tcpdump is another tool there are good tools to check what is going on

[imcintyre]

royd;

Perhaps the "plugging the gaming pc directly to the modem and lag goes away" is a bit of a red herring. You would need to plug all your pc's in to the modem to simulate the load on the cable line.

[mercyh]

Royd,

I would take Imcintyre's suggestion in his first post. I would recommend that you try EDB's test on the first post on this page: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=40313.30