[cod] RHE4 new 2.6 Kernel

[Mark J. DeFilippis]

Thanks Nate, and Jay as always!  I have put the order in for the ES4 upgrade.
I prey every time I put in a change ticket with support. Lately, it has been
very poor.  I hope they can get it right 100%.  There is always something
missing when they make a wholesale change...

Nate, I noticed that for the period that they were migrating in the new 
data center
they had major BGP convergence issues, and it would clear my servers.

At first they blamed it on my location.  Yea sure.  Everyone around the 
USA, west coast,
east, central, and it is the whole Internet not you.

Glad I have access to certain info at a carrier that happens to feed the 
majority
of servermatrix and theplanet.  The peer showed loss of BGP adjacency. I 
understand
they had to make changes and re groom fiber, but it was clear from the 
flapping that they
don't have BGP dampening configured on their border routers.

I have experience with CRisco 65xx, but on the carrier side for larger 
customers I design
for I use Juniper M-20's and M-40's, as well as Laurel Networks 120's. 
These are pretty big boys.
Smallest line card on a Laurel is the 13 port DS3 card. But these are big 
boys, with 8 port
gig cards wire speed, etc. In their design, they are likely using the 
Crisco 6509's are layer
two aggregation devices.  While the design is a simple classic design, it 
relies on default
load balancing provided by these switching/routers.

I just have to wonder if they know what they are doing.  I have noticed that
my pings run anywhere from 60ms from NY direct Level3 to 92ms.  I have the 
ability to test
from many area's from around the US from work.  From each location, the 
variation in delay
is past the local loop in to servermatrix/theplanet.  This means they are 
highly likely using
load balancing on the Multi-link trunks that are inter-switch and/or 
switch/router uplinks.

The above switches I have recently been working with in building Int-serv 
RSVP cores for service
provider rfc2547bis MPBGP MPLS networks, where LSP's maintain MPLS based 
traffic engineering
to provider QOS to IP based QOS CE devices.  We found that that MLT load 
balancing is not
a strong point in these switches.  Adding in the additional distribution 
layers of inexpensive Crisco 650x
switches for aggregation, and you have the poor network design they have.

One of my guys designed something like this, with internal MLT load 
balancing in the core
through the distribution layer, he would be unemployed.  Maybe they have 
all CCIE's. there? ;-))

You are not imagining it.  I have a server over at EV1 as well, and my ping 
times to that
server is rock solid at 52-66ms. This is reasonable considering much of the 
long haul is
DWDM photonic, (plus local loops, and ISP), but note you are going ISP, to 
loop to loop
to IXC to loop to LEC to loop to Datacenter.  The bulk of the loops are 
phototonic SONET
with little latency. If you are generous, add 10ms latency.  NY to London 
on TAT14 I peaked
at today is running steady at 74ms RTD (Round Trip Delay). (That is our 
Add/Drop Multiplexor directly
off the light-wave mux driving the TAT cable.  (It is not speed of light as 
this is
not speed of light in a vacuum, it is speed of light through glass, which 
we estimate the
refraction index (to be a liberal of 1.32), hence the higher delay... In a 
perfect vacuum we should
get a RTD of about 53ms.  So 74ms is pretty good).

Their core is built differently, hence why their servers are more 
expensive. ;-)  I have not made up my mind about Theplanet, but if my users 
keep getting dumped, saving $100/mo on a server that is nearly worthless, 
is throwing $225/mo a way, not saving $100/mo.  I consider their networks 
vs EV1 as hamburger is to steak.

Don't get me wrong. They are nice, growing, but their CEO had a "less 
expensive" model
in place for their core than EV1 does, and it shows in ping times.  I think 
I would
rather a sustained 70ms ping time than a ping time that has 20+ms of jitter 
in it and jumps
from 52ms to 70ms like a yo yo.  I won't say I have never seen a network do 
this.  I have been in the business for 18 years.  I have.  But we fixed it, 
as we consider that "badly broken".


Dr D


At 12:16 AM 3/21/2005, you wrote:
>Yeah I've got RHEL 4 also.  BTW, I was the one that posted about the 
>teamspeak / mysql issue.  You need the compat package for mysql - has the 
>old libraries and such so that you can use them instead of the new ones 
>that come with the new version of mysql on RHEL4:
>Snipet from the teamspeak server.ini:
>VendorLib=/usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so.10.0.0
>
>The package you need:
>MySQL-shared-compat-4.0.23-0.i386.rpm
>It may be a different set of numbers now but that's the name: 
>MySQL-shared-compat
>
>After that teamspeak will work with mysql.
>
>I too ran into problems when I turned on journaling.  The main reason is 
>because on a heavy loaded system because of the journal update time being 
>5 seconds it can cause' some lag - there is a setting you can pass that 
>lowers this - used to work great with the 2.4 kernel but really the 2.6 
>doesn't need the journal setting from what I've tested - hurts it more 
>than helps as Jay mentioned.
>
>But you can do one performance trick that seems to have helped some.  You 
>can set this in your fstab:
>Example:
>ext3    defaults,noatime        1 2
>Add noatime after defaults on the hard drive your running your game 
>servers off of.  Basic explination:
>"The noatime setting eliminates the need by the system to make writes to 
>the file system for files which are simply being read....."
>
>Use at your own risk :) I just thought I'd mention it.
>
>I recently got upgraded to a dual 73gig SCSI server.  ThePlanet stuck me 
>in the new datacenter at infomart in Dallas.  Has anyone been put in that 
>datacenter yet?  I've been receiving complaints of ping spikes from one of 
>my customers that is from California.  I gathered trace routes from 
>everyone and it seems to be the link between datacenter 3 and 5 (the new 
>one - infomart).
>
>Anyone else ran into anything yet?  From what I can tell it seems to be 
>only from the western side of the US because of the trace routes I've 
>received - the ones that had the problem were in like Arizona and 
>California etc:
>
>13   246 ms   200 ms   199 ms  dist-vlan32.dsr3-2.dllstx3.theplanet.com 
>[70.85.127.62]
>14    75 ms    57 ms    57 ms  po32.dsr1-2.dllstx5.theplanet.com 
>[70.85.127.110]
>15    58 ms    61 ms    58 ms  po2.tp-car3.dllstx5.theplanet.com 
>[70.84.160.165]
>16    57 ms    56 ms    56 ms  39.70-84-187.reverse.theplanet.com 
>[70.84.187.39]
>
>And yes I've opened a support ticket but I'm not getting anywhere with 
>that :(  I realize that trace route packets are low priority blah blah but 
>when it's consistent between a whole bunch of different people and the 
>ping is that high - I don't buy into that.
>
>Anyways.......
>
>--
>NateDog
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:jayco1 at charter.net>Jay Vasallo
>To: <mailto:cod at icculus.org>cod at icculus.org
>Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2005 9:41 PM
>Subject: Re: [cod] RHE4 new 2.6 Kernel
>
>Hey Mark,
>
>I rented a few servers from the planet last month and have the same setup 
>you do to the t. Works great. I also noticed that it deals with swap mem a 
>little different than the rhe3. But other than that, runs fine. Did some 
>research on the new file journaling but noticed a decrease in productivity 
>and increase in ping when i set the journaling to on so that was a waste 
>of time. But other than that, if you use it exactly the way the planet 
>gives it to you, the server rocks.
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:defilm at acm.org>Mark J. DeFilippis
>To: <mailto:cod at icculus.org>cod at icculus.org
>Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2005 9:23 PM
>Subject: [cod] RHE4 new 2.6 Kernel
>
>
>
>Anyone had experience with running the COD binaries on the new RedHat 
>Enterprise Server 4.0 with 2.6 SMP and threading enhancements?
>
>On theplanet.com, and servermatrix.com, there are a few quotes here and 
>there about "nice performance increase". (Actually I would be happy if it 
>is better than the existing ES3 SMP kernel which will often run a cpu up 
>to 100% while the other sits idle at 0%, after the major lag, it kicks in. 
>(yea! isn't that proactive!)
>
>I am hoping 2.6 enhancements to RHE4 does the trick.
>
>Anyone?
>
>I did see some issues with Teamspeak and issues with mysql.  At the time 
>of posting, the admins recommended solution was to rev back up2date for 
>the mysql package to 4.0, and Teamspeak is a happy camper again.
>
>Any input from someone doing this already would be appreciated.
>
>Thanks
>
>Md
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>S1,Mark J. DeFilippis, Ph. D EE       defilm at acm.org
>                                       defilm at ieee.org
>
S1-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark J. DeFilippis, Ph. D EE          defilm at acm.org
                                       defilm at ieee.org


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