my server is terribly slow

[aicul]

Hello,

I have a mac mini server running SL and it has recently become dramatically slow.

A simple file transfer of a few Mb can take minutes. Actually, you can see the copy hang...then suddenly go thru a full speed.

My thinking is that some form of setup is not good.

Problem is, the mini server setup was so easy, and worked so smoothly (3 years) that I never learnt anything about server management, etc.


Can anyone suggest some guidance or ask questions to assist me here ?

thank you

[justperry]

Originally Posted by aicul

Hello,

I have a mac mini server running SL and it has recently become dramatically slow.

A simple file transfer of a few Mb can take minutes. Actually, you can see the copy hang...then suddenly go thru a full speed.

My thinking is that some form of setup is not good.

Problem is, the mini server setup was so easy, and worked so smoothly (3 years) that I never learnt anything about server management, etc.


Can anyone suggest some guidance or ask questions to assist me here ?

thank you

Did you ever restart it?
How much space is left on the HDD/SSD?
How many page files?
Do you ever do maintenance?

[aicul]

Further to check :

Restart : yes last week
note: this seemed to solve the problem, then slowness just came back

HDD: 730Gb left of 1Tb

Page files: ? (what are these?)

Maintenance: I was in the understanding that there are cron jobs that do this automatically.

Anything special I should do as maintenance ?

Forgot to mention: the 1tb disk is set as 2 RAID slices

[justperry]

Originally Posted by aicul

Further to check :

Restart : yes last week
note: this seemed to solve the problem, then slowness just came back

HDD: 730Gb left of 1Tb

Page files: ? (what are these?)

Maintenance: I was in the understanding that there are cron jobs that do this automatically.

Anything special I should do as maintenance ?

Forgot to mention: the 1tb disk is set as 2 RAID slices

1. 1 week ago is OK, I thought you might have been running it for ages.

2. More than enough space left, no worries here.

3. A pagefile is a VM( Virtual Memory) and is a file which the system writes to if it runs out of physical memory, they are located in /private/var/vm

4. You could set up maintenance in a cron job AFAIK but standard OTB OS X only does three scripts, namely daily,weekly and monthly

5. Maintenance, I'll explain below.

6. I don't know much about raid, don't think it should be an issue, but you never know.

Now for maintenance, there are plenty of free maintenance programs, like Onyx, in onyx these two are the most important, maintenance and cleaning.
I myself do this manually but this will be easier for you.

[aicul]

Hi

Some more information

point 3, pagefiles.
There are 2 files in /private/var/vm seen thru terminal with ls -la

size=67108864 file=swapfile0
size=67108864 file=swapfile1

point 5, maintenance
Indeed, Onyx I run that occasionally on my mba for special settings.

I'll install and run that overnight on the miniserver and post back.