Performance issue on Stable

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

This is a quite vague at this point, but I'm looking idea on how to
track down performance problems.

We moved an application from a development machine to a client's
managed server an noticed it running quite a bit slower.  Simple
requests[1] take about three to five times longer.  And this happens
when the load average is above on on the fast machine and load
average is is < 0.1 on the client's server.

I'd like to provide the ISP with more info than "It's running slow" so
I'm wondering what tools to use to compare these two machines.

Some of the basic specs are:

                Development         Client's Server
                ---------------     ----------------------
    CPU         Athlon XP1800+      Xeon
    Mhz         1150.591            1793.936
    cache       256KB               512KB
    bogomips    2260.99             3565.15
    RAM         1GB                 .5GB
    OS          Deb Unstable        Deb Sarge
    Kernel      2.6.6               2.4.28
    Tasks       115                 214
    fs          xfs atime           ext3 noatime, nodiratime

It seem 

>From that alone it would seem like the client's server would be
faster, although I'm sure that's not the entire story.  Yet, the
development server can have a load average over 1 and still process
simple requests faster than the clients when its load average is <
0.1.

vmstat shows no swapping, so memory does not see to be a problem.








[1] It's a fast_cgi application that's just returning a small file
from the file system -- no database access involved in this request.

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org