We recently switched from a dedicated machine to a virtual one.
Now our Dedicated server had 1 Intel Xeon 3.2ghz CPU with 4 GB ram and normal 7200RPM WD harddisks.
The average load was around 0.8~2.
Now since yesterday we have moved our business to a Virtual Server environment (VMWare ESX) for better redundancy.
We have freshly installed a new Centos Enviroment on this VPS server.
We have 2GB ram, 80GB space (enough) and 1 virtual CPU.
The load now averages between 3 and 30.
It has become quite unstable and the websites on it respond too slow (3s for a pageload).
Now I'm wondering what causes this odd behavior.
Here is a copy of the "top" command
We are also not being limited in CPU usage by our VPS provider. (the virtual CPU should automatically adapt to how much we use and according to the hosting company the current server we run on has 70% idle cpu at almost any given time.)
Now one of the discussions I'm currently having with our hosting provider is IF enabling multiple virtual CPU's would increase performance and fix our load issues?and why)
so my questions are:
1. Are there any special steps one would need to take on a WMware hosted CentOS virtual environment which 'once neglected' could cause such issues as I describe?
2. Would enabling more virtual CPU's offer a solution (and more importantly .. why ?)
3. Are there any other things I should consider when running in a virtual environment?
Now our Dedicated server had 1 Intel Xeon 3.2ghz CPU with 4 GB ram and normal 7200RPM WD harddisks.
The average load was around 0.8~2.
Now since yesterday we have moved our business to a Virtual Server environment (VMWare ESX) for better redundancy.
We have freshly installed a new Centos Enviroment on this VPS server.
We have 2GB ram, 80GB space (enough) and 1 virtual CPU.
The load now averages between 3 and 30.
It has become quite unstable and the websites on it respond too slow (3s for a pageload).
Now I'm wondering what causes this odd behavior.
Here is a copy of the "top" command
There are no processes which consistantly hog the CPU, rather just normal HTTPD threads like you'd see in normal operation. I also don't get the idea that RAM shortage is an issue here as there is little to no swap.top - 13:07:05 up 9 days, 23:25, 3 users, load average: 8.91, 5.95, 8.38
Tasks: 167 total, 27 running, 137 sleeping, 1 stopped, 2 zombie
Cpu(s): 86.5%us, 12.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 1.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2059620k total, 1933192k used, 126428k free, 74532k buffers
Swap: 4095992k total, 145344k used, 3950648k free, 900708k cached
We are also not being limited in CPU usage by our VPS provider. (the virtual CPU should automatically adapt to how much we use and according to the hosting company the current server we run on has 70% idle cpu at almost any given time.)
Now one of the discussions I'm currently having with our hosting provider is IF enabling multiple virtual CPU's would increase performance and fix our load issues?and why)
so my questions are:
1. Are there any special steps one would need to take on a WMware hosted CentOS virtual environment which 'once neglected' could cause such issues as I describe?
2. Would enabling more virtual CPU's offer a solution (and more importantly .. why ?)
3. Are there any other things I should consider when running in a virtual environment?
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