[Server-devel] School Server system speed diagnotic

[Sameer Verma]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 12:13 AM, George Hunt <georgejhunt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In the Philippine deployments, the local decision makers have tried to buy
> locally, and the machines use roughly 80 watts, idling, bursting to 120
> during startup.
>
> The inadequate power situation causes rolling brown outs and load shedding.
> I've been unable to document the decrease in performance they might
> encounter if they shifted their usage to a dual core Atom 30 watt MSI or a
> 10 watt fitpc. Selling the idea of deep cycle batteries for school servers,
> would be a lot easier if we didn't need so much power drain!
>
> For lack of anything better, I started asking them to time the startup time
> until the school server presented a logon prompt.  Yet, I also noticed that
> if network interfaces were down, or if there was no wan connectivity, there
> would be timeouts which would add noise to such an approach.
>
> As I have understood what I've read, the ejabberd service is currently the
> performance bottleneck.  I don't have much familiarity with cpu test
> suites.  Does anyone have a suggestion on benchmark programs that would be
> useful in predicting actual performance in the schools? If no one has
> experience in the area, I can do the googling and reading.  Sometimes it
> makes sense to ask first.
>
> Thanks
> George
>
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>

You could run nmon on the server and gather stats.
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-analyze_aix/ and
http://nmon.sourceforge.net/

This is what Ben Tran used in gathering data for his thesis on loading
the server. http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/46/Testing_the_OLPC_School_Server_Benjamin_Tran_SFSU.pdf
(see page 44)

nmon also has a Excel spreadsheet to import the data and produce pretty graphs.

We also run munin on the Jamaica servers to gather rolling stats.
http://munin-monitoring.org/ and
https://library.linode.com/server-monitoring/munin/fedora-14

cheers,
Sameer
-- 
Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Professor, Information Systems
San Francisco State University
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://commons.sfsu.edu/
http://olpcsf.org/
http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/