My Dedicated Server Specs But Poor Performance: What is Wrong...?

JudderMan

Hi guys,

Having used solidseovps servers for a few months, which are awesome and only have good things to say about them, however, I wanted more. I was always causing SER to 'not repsond' and freeze and it was driving me insane (ended up creating projects on my laptop, backing them up and restoring them on my VPS).

So, after chatting to a mate that has a very quick dual-quad-core dedi and gets great speeds and only his RAM is the problem at the moment for him, I bought this:

2 x E5530 processors - quad core and 2.4Ghz each, so that's 8 cores (and 16 threads) total available on this hardware. See here for the specs:
http://ark.intel.com/products/37103/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5530-8M-Cache-2_40-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI

1TB HDD

1GBps uplink

32GB RAM

2IPs

But.......it's still not that good. It struggles with anything more than 350 threads. I have 60 proxies (40 semi, 20 private). Run Captcha Sniper (will buy CB soon). I have checked on speedtest.net and it's getting 70MBps so I've asked them to sort it out. I did originally want AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo), 8 cores but they had none in stock and 'upgraded' them to the one I have for no additional cost....even though I feel the one I wanted is better (can any computer boffins confirm as this isn't my forte at all). In terms of LPM I managed 50LPM yesterday but then had Out of Memory notices this morning and it barely reaches 10 LPM now. I know LPM isn't the be all and end all, but just for reference. One Group of projects had 70k links submitted across all of yesterday which is pretty good but the rest of the Groups are a bit lame. In total there are 450 projects but not all are active yet. I'm not using site lists (yet). It runs at 99% of CPU at all times, RAM is 1GB (used to push the SolidSEO to 3 of 4GB RAM).

I can still only run 60 projects at one time, same as solidseovps Wizard VPS, any more and it crashes, which is not what I expected from something that is meant to be a lot quicker and costs 1.5 times more than the Solid VPS. If it's still crap then I will go with the company my friend has his dedi with, but it's twice the price of this one I have.....

donaldbeck

That's quite a beefcake of a server.

It just sounds like you are trying to run too many projects at once.

Is your friend running significantly more projects than you at one time? 60 is already a lot.

More projects = more problems in my experience.

Maybe you can use less projects and use the scheduler?

Tim89

Captcha sniper could be your problem mate, im not trying to disrespect the makers of it but that is the main difference between my servers and your build. 

Or

If we actually take a look at what could be the issue, a clock speed of 2.40ghz isnt all that great.. and having 8 cores running at 2.40ghz is completely useless (I bet you microsoft turns off a few of your cores as they are not needed! performance tweak) anyway, I dont think SER or the way SER uses its resources is very dependant on extra cores or dual core or quadcore, main factors here is clock speed and RAM, personally I would have gone for a CPU with a higher base clock even if that meant purchasing a dual core.

lastly,  check your memory timings for your ram in your bios, ive built 3-4 machines made with top quality big brand name parts thinking that things would simply slot in and auto configure themselves but on many occasions the timings in the bios are out of wack causing bsod's  and other cool stuff.

One of my machines has a 3770k 3.5ghz and does 200 projects at 600 threads with ease, main differences is this:

Properly configured bios

higher cpu clock speed 

I have CB

on another note, it could be the way you and I set up our SER.

JudderMan

Thanks guys. Donald: I wanted something to run not only SER but other tools too, but currently I'm only running SER. I used to run 60 projects with the SolidSEOVPS so thought this one could do more.

Tim89, cheers for the info. I was against building my own server as per your recommendation the other week, but the chance of me wrecking something is much higher than having a support team there just in case. This server is $90pm so I will get around 18 months out of it compared to building a server (plus cash flow isn't great at the moment just after Xmas LOL). Tim do you use CB then? Or what else do you use for captchas? Spamvilla/Mega OCR are no-nos at the moment it seems. I really don't want to use DBC again as it sucks so much money.

As mentioned, I did want the higher CPU but was given a different one....might complain and get the one I wanted from the start. True about the set up of SER. I have some spam projects, some tightly filtered ones, and some regular T1-3 ones for clients. I don't really want to run all 450 projects at the same time, but at the same time I don't want each project to get only a few hours of activity per day.

In all honesty, once I get this puppy running and doing what I want it, I won't need clients and can just blast my own sites and not have to be too careful (I always buy domains for clients to 301 to their site, but still take it easy).