Hi we've been encountering a strange problem with a couple of our dedicated servers within our private rack. It seems like there is always a lag (ranges from 5-20 secs) from the time a request is sent to the server before it starts serving files. Once the request starts being sent everything loads very quickly. It doesn't seem like it's because the server is loaded (top returns around 90+% cpu idle) and the memory/disk are nowhere near saturated.

We suspect it's because of something within Apache's configuration because, being very new to systems administration, we often use WHM to configure stuff on our server. Our other servers do not exhibit this delay. Anyone with suggestions on how to tweak and optimize the settings in our httpd.conf? We've also noticed that the sites displaying this slow characteristic use the IP 10.0.0.x instead of the servers assigned IP. Any possible IP resolving issues there?

That is what I would look at first.

Also check to make sure that the Apache log files are not at or above 2GB. Once a log file hits 2GB, Apache slows to nearly a halt until the log files are emptied/removed.

How can this be corrected? We tried reassigning the actual server IP manually but it isn't available inside WHM. When we tried to edit the httpd.conf file (under the site's virtualhost entry) to the server's assigned IP , the site becomes inaccessible (after a restart of apache). This is really puzzling because the server itself is hardly loaded.

Please check your DNS.

Sorry but could you be more specific on the action we need to take? Do you mean that we should check our DNS on WHM?

Please ping your web site from the server itself and check the time.
Regards

Ok I've pinged the IP addresses of the server (both the actual server IP and the 10.0.0.x format IP) from inside the server itself. Here is a sample log of both pings issued:

64 bytes from <Actual server ip>: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=14.6 ms
64 bytes from <Actual server ip>: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=25.7 ms
64 bytes from <Actual server ip>: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=21.2 ms

64 bytes from 10.0.0.x: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.035 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.x: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.019 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.x: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.029 ms

Anything abnormal with these figures?

Also, we were trying to reassign the IP of the site hosted on the server from within WHM, but it keeps failing with this error: "Cannot determine old ip address"

hi anyone else able to help with this?

If you have both eth0 and eth1 enabled, and eth0 with a 10.x.x.x IP address, ensure you set the NIC for cPanel to use in WHM's Basic Settings to eth1. This will ensure that sites and ipaliases are put on eth1 and not eth0.