SUMMARY : Slowness in Solaris 2.6

From: Rubens Mau (rmaster@dialdata.com.br)
Date: Tue Oct 21 1997 - 11:09:49 CDT


Thanks for all the answered that I received. The problem was quite strange,
and its solution either. Altough the problem is resolved, many interesting
questions remained.
Is someone can make more contributions, I would be glad.

 Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.COM>
Oscar Goldes <ogolde@impsat1.com.ar>
Jim Harmon <jharmon@telecnnct.com>
gibian@stars1.hanscom.af.mil (Marc S. Gibian)
"Karl E. Vogel" <vogelke@c17mis.region2.wpafb.af.mil>
Rick Reineman reineman1@llnl.gov
Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au Kevin Sheehan

I recomend reading www.sun.com, look for "Sun on the net" then "Sun Performance
Information".

PROBLEM
-------

I have just upgraded my main smtp/pop machine. I ran before in a Solaris 2.4
SS-20 64 MRAM machine, with all the patches applied. Now I have a Ultra 170
128 MRAM with Solaris 2.6. I have recompiled all the applications with
gcc2.7.2.3

I am experiencing slowness in some network services, in particular POP. The
main problem is in retrieving attach files, taking three times longer. The
slowness is seen from the client, and is observed along the retrieval. It
seems that it works at pulses. The same problem happens at off peak hours.
At the same conditions, I succeed to connect normally to my old machine.

It seems that with the Eudora client the problem is worst than using
Netscape Mail.

I can also notice a slowness in establishing the smtp connection, from a
client machine, but this problem is not so serious.

I looked for doc regarding performance with Solaris 2.6 , but with no
success, even I didn't find the SE toolkit for it.

Solution
--------

In the ultra 170 machine ( solaris 2.6 ) I changed the ethernet cable from
the RJ-45 port to the AUI port - and the problem disappered !

I observed many FCS and Alginment errors in the ethernet switch monitor when
downloading the attached mail files. But when I changed the sun network
connection from the ethernet switch to a plain hub, everyting was fine. I
could get better results reducing the sun mtu to 512 bytes.

Conclusion: I had a compatibility problem betwwen the sun and the ethernet
switch, that made problems only with big packages, in downloading big files
- when using the RJ-45 10Mbytes port.

Rubens Mau
Dialdata Systems
info@dialdata.com.br



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