Performance Problems on VMWare

mknausmknaus
edited March 2008 in Monitoring Software v12 and lower
Hi there,



we installed the actual release of Serverscheck Monitoring in a VMWare Machine, guest OS is XP Professional, granting one CPU Core and 1024 MB RAM.



The VMware Host is a HP ProLiant DL380 2x 3,6 GHz Intel Xeon CPU and full 4 GB RAM. The Serverscheck Monitoring machine is the only active guest on the VMWare host right now.



We added 20 windows health checks and are running into massive performance problems. The virtual machine is whenever a "wave" of checks start at 100% CPU load and after running over the weekend it showed a "Out of Memory in Line 12" Error-Message.



This leads me to two questions:

1. What is the recommended Server Sizing if we are planning to monitor around 30 Servers with a total of estimated 40 active rules?



2. Is there any possibility to increase the time between the windows health checks are performed and/or can they set to different intervals per server to balance load?



Thanks in advance,



Martin Knaus

IT-Support

Bio- Medical Research GmbH

Comments

  • AdministratorAdministrator
    What process is taking more than 100% CPU?



    Please report CPU usage and Memory usage of following components:

    - all executables starting with monitoring_*

    - s-graphs.exe

    - s-alerts.exe

    - s-server.exe



    Behavior is not normal. Possibly another component is causing the issue. We have seen cases where this was caused by antivirus software.


  • mknausmknaus
    The CPU mainload is produced by the Internet Explorer iexplore.exe, the mentioned monitoring_* processes are coming up shortly but arent producing a constant load which would be nameable (at least at time).



    Memory consumption is led by

    monitoring_thread2 with about 300 MB,

    S-Scan.exe with 92 MB,

    IExplore.exe again with 54 MB,

    S-Server.exe 47 MB,

    S-Alerts.exe 38 MB,

    Monitoring_Rule.exe 36 MB,

    Monitoring_Manager.exe 15 MB,

    Monitoring_Security.exe 15 MB and

    Monitoring-Watcher 10 MB.



    I restarted the guest around 3 1/2 hours ago, so i can't determine longtime memory consumption yet.



    The machine is a pretty fresh XP SP2 Professional Installation at most recent patch level, beside the ServersCheck Monitoring Software, there is only the GSM Modem Drivers (Nokia 6210i) installed and the tool to administrate the Tibbo Device Servers. We didn't install IE 7 and are running therefore on Version 6. There is no virus scan software installed.
  • AdministratorAdministrator
    IE6 is probably struggling with the FLASH part of the main dashboard.



    This is a known issue in flash when multiple flash applets are loaded into the same page.



    All other parameters seem to be normal in terms of memory usage.



    I would kill IE7. The dashboard shouldn't be always open on the VMWare but looked at from a remote system. (that is how it is typically done)
  • mknausmknaus
    Okay, so we closed the (Internet Explorer) dashboard on the Monitoring machine itself and are connecting from remote, which was for test purposes only anyway. As it looks like from task manager this is improving the impact on ressources already a lot.



    So would you recommend to update to IE7 regarding possible flash applet problems?



    Can you give me any "best practise" in server sizing anyway? Reliability in notifications is the main purpose for us to monitor our systems, so we can't afford running into problems here ;). As already mentioned we are planning to use about 40 rules with 30 servers, windows health check for every server and some others.



    And as last question: Is it possible to change the frequency the windows health check is performed? I have seen sliders with other rules, where it is able to adjust the intervals.


  • AdministratorAdministrator
    Regarding the IE and Flash issue: unfortunately we do not develop either products.



    From experience, we know that Firefox has been better handling flash compared to IE.



    In terms of sizing see following URL:

    http://www.serverscheck.com/monitoring_software/requirements.asp



    Intervals can be configured to any interval you want:

    http://wiki.serverscheck.net/index.php/Define_Rules
  • gmillerarmtgmillerarmt
    mknaus,



    Only use firefox. IE7 w/ flash is even worse then IE6, the flash performance in IE is so slow; no fault of serverscheck.



    I am running a stand alone dedicated box, just to serverscheck, Dell poweredge 1435, dual 3Ghz Xeons, 3GB memory, with 7200K 400GB satas and performance is very good. I am running about 200 rules with very aggressive monitoring intervals. Serverscheck takes up 1.8GB when running after a day or two. I found a significant performance boost when i went from 2GB to 3GB of physical memory but the biggest boost came when i disable hyper-threading on the processors.



    You may be shooting yourself in the foot by running it on XP since you can only have a maximum of 10 simultaneous connections with that desktop OS. That may be your performance issue.



    I run a copy of the server in a VM for testing upgrades on my desktop, a dual core machine w/ 3GB of memory, and don't have any issues with the VM's performance.



    IMO, I would bump the memory to 3GB and run a server OS.
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