Help with Xserver 10.4.4 slowing to a crawl

[vudutu]

I am hoping someone can shed some light on this problem. We are a small Art school, I have Dual 2 Gig G5 Xserver with 2 gig RAM running 10.4.4. The only things running on it are AFP and Open Directory. I am using LDAP and all user files are on the Xserver. I have 3 250 Gig drives, OS is on one drive, Faculty on another and students on the third. It seems to have gotten slower since I put 10.4.4 on it and today it slowed to a crawl to the point that I had to shut everyone down and restart, when I did I ran Applejack on it and skipped Permission repairs because I did not have time (I’ll do that this weekend). it sems bette now but somethig is wrong. lately I have seen logon times in minutes not seconds, It usually happens mid day when 40 to 50 users are on. Network tests at this time show the traffic was not excessive and no problems pinging the server. What the heck is going on, has anyone seen problems with 10.4.4, should I go to 10.4.6?
Thanks
VUDUTU

[Anonymous]

We had the same problem recently with a 10.4.5 G4erver.

Here was the layout as I still don’t know what fixed it.

Sunday night Storm,
2 of 4 drives dead in raid pairs (drive 1+2 raid A) (drive 3+4 raid B)
Drive 1 and Drive 4 died. Raid 1 mirror broke.

Monday, Switchout to Building based Fiber happened. Route to the network changes, server wasn’t put back in the correct VLAN.

Tuesday, Server was not responsive. Rebooted (from terminal) seemed fine. About 30 minutes after at least 15 people logged in, server stopped responding, clients started to hang. Update to 10.4.6 nothing changed.

Wednesday, server was rebuilt, nothing seemed to fix it and I wasn’t about to transfer all of the settings and files. Server was mistakenly built using same Serial # as original server. So, I changed the serial number on the old server. System started working without probems. No lockup has been seen and it has been running 2 days now without a problem.

So, try changing your serial number for starters.

[vudutu]

Thanks for the input. I don’t think my problem is the same as this server has been running OK. Where did you change the serial number? Was it the same hardware and SW server version? i don’t get why this would be an issue.

[vudutu]

I am about out of ideas, I have tested DNS fwd and reverse, Looked at logs, restarted, run Applejack. Does anyone have any suggestions? What is the best server vs. 10.4.4, 10.4.5 or 10.4.6.

[foilpan]

When it becomes unresponsive, can you ssh into the server?

Can you tell if the AFP service has spiked CPU usage?

A client of mine had a similar problem, and AFP seemed a likely culprit. I’m just waiting for it to happen again to see if there’s any weight to that theory. There was nothing really helpful in any logs right after the period of unresponsiveness and the subsequent reboot.

I even had Apple Enterprise support on the phone soon after, but they didn’t have much information for me.

Are all these affected Xserves dual 2.x Ghz models?

[vudutu]

No I did not get a chance, watching it closer now, there is a lot of discussions, 10.4.4 gets blamed, check out this post.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2063489#2063489

[vudutu]

My problem appears to be the 10.4. server bug. My problems have not so much been shutdowns but services slowdowns. Bad news is 10.4.6 has mixed success. See this post (same as the previous post)

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2063489#2063489

It’s worth reading just for a couple of tips in there.

Also trying to make sense of this servermgrd process bump. Not sure if this is a hint or normal.

https://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=12152

I am pretty fried and tired right now, will post more later.
Thanks Craig

[Author]

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