Had a tech at the DC take a look at the boot menu and he was able to boot into 2.6.10 locally and now my system appears to be using the latest FC2 kernel.
One thing I was looking for was using HDPARM with the SATA drives but it appears I would need an even later kernel to use it? Or perhaps can I just update the libata to the latest version without messing up plesk?
Thats a much more in depth kernel question, probably better asked on the Fedora lists. I do support that in the ASL kernels, and in their case SATA detection and optimization is internal. That means for the most part you dont need to set any hdparm's at boot time or via rc.d.
Hey Scott,
Whats involved in getting the ASL kernels up and running? Not that I doubt your RPMS, but when I did a yum update with your RPMS to get from plesk 7.5.2 to 7.5.4 it crushed my plesk install completely. It was so bad, it was beyond my ability to fix and I had to get (purchase) swsoft software support to go in and fix it. It was something with my install or dependencies or something, never did find out what hosed the plesk install. After that I am extremely jumpy about installing anything that is affects the OS or plesk in any way shape or form.
I have been thinking of dumping the current plesk install/domains to a temporary cheap server and install a new OS on this server from scratch with hardware sata raid (instead of software raid) because we have had performance issues on the main forum that the server hosts. We have tweaked until the cows come home apache and mysql. Only thing I can think of it being is an IO issue or something but I can't determine that for certain unless I get hdparm up and working and check out some benchmarks etc.
Up to 2.6.9 , and specifically CentOS4 and RHEL4 have a known IO bug. So if you're on that it could be the issue.
ASL is a kernel and a userspace IPS, it doesnt interact with PSA directly, if you want to disable either its pretty straight forward, boot into the old kernel, or remove mod_security.
Interesting. We were running FC2 2.6.5, now at 2.6.10. Our board will start to shoot the load averages up over 40 or 50 and nearly freeze when we got about 400 or so users online at once. I wonder if the simple kernel upgrade to 2.6.10 will make a difference? We are running apache, firewall, mysql all fromt eh same box along with software raid. What do you think?
Load is generally a factor of IO, and that kind of spike can come from any number of things, a buggy kernel, slow disks, or just that you've got a really busy system. In the case of a busy system, it might be that youve just reached capacity of what your system can handle, so it might be time to look at breaking things up.
That's what I was thinking too. But the research I have done says our hardware should handle at least 800 perhaps 1000 users before the load becomes a problem. Dual Opteron 242's with 4gb ram. I do think our weak link is the drives (SATA) but I can't be certain.
I had a chance to look over ASL. Do you guys offer an install service for the product? Looks like something I might like to have on the server.
