Hi, there. Recently one of my friends used FreeBSD 4.8 to setup a web server, and the network connection is 100MB/s. But every time when the visitors approached 300 people, the network turned so slow, and eventually "dead". Why is that? And how should we solve this problem. I don't know what further information I shall apply, but please ask me.

Sincerely,
HOUSCOUS

You might want to post what type of hardware is involved. It may help in finding a solution to your problem.

Processors 1
Model AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2200+
Chip MHz 1800
PCI Devices agp0: VIA Generic host to PCI bridge
atapci0: VIA 8235 ATA133 controller
isab0: PCI to ISA bridge (vendor=1106 device=3177)
pci0: USB controller
pci1: S3 model 8d04 graphics accelerator
pcib1: PCI to PCI bridge (vendor=1106 device=b091)
uhci0: VIA 83C572 USB controller
uhci1: VIA 83C572 USB controller
uhci2: VIA 83C572 USB controller
vr0: VIA VT6102 Rhine II 10/100BaseTX
xl0: 3Com 3c905B-TX Fast Etherlink XL

IDE Devices ad0: WDC WD800JB-00CRA1 (Capacity: 78.18 GB)

SCSI Devices none

Physical Memory 79% 210.91 MB 776.29 MB 987.20 MB
Disk Swap 16% 1.64 GB 315.85 MB 1.95 GB

How long are your CAT5 cables, are they twisted, crushed other physical deformation?
Have you run any testing on your cables?
Are you using QoS on this machine or it's gateway?
Do you have a decent quality switching hub?
Does it have crap hard disks that connot supply the data? Have you got the optimum settings on them?

Kindly suggest to observe and post the server/platform system load statistics that occur when you are experiening this problem. Neo

IMHO thats alot of swap.

personaly if i have 1 gig of ram i will add no more then 500mb-1024mb of swap.

what web server are you running?

i can only assume you are useing apache.

is that 300 simotaniously or a total of 300 connections throught the day?

if it is a total for the day, you may have used up your aloted bandwidth from your provider.

please elaborate on the "it dies"

1) is it the network card that shutsdown?
2) is it the OS?
3) is it the web server stops responding?

I would do the following items.

1) how many conccerant servers do you allow to run via apache?
2) when the web server dies (what does your apache log and syslog say? anything abnormal?
3) how is the load on the machine right befor it hits 250 users then right at 300-350.
4) can you access the web server locally vs. from another host after it "dies"

Also if you have lots of swap, is the swap file or swap area in a spot where the system has to go thru series of directory to get to it?

say if you install your swap file at a location like

/disk2/var/james/files/imp/swap


that can also slow your system down because your system will have to go thru all those directories and subdirectories reading them before it actually gets to the swap file. (and that takes somep processing power)