I just got the Dual Xeon 4GB RAM from Planet, and I installed 3 instances of UrbanTerror game servers, they run very nicely, the response from the server is great, shots are good and the connection is very smooth and responsive BUT it gets horrific lags every couple of minutes.

I know someone who has a server through Planet as well with lower specs, runs same amount of servers plus all other stuff like Vent server, Web Server etc...

Everytime someone visits our site the lag on the server goes up and the netgraph starts freaking out. What could I be doing wrong ? The server runs RHEL5, all game servers are on a spare 2nd drive on their own partition. Any ideas ? I tried getting a hold of the owner of those other servers but no luck yet.

ANy ideas would be really appreciated, thanks everyone !

Does it only happen when someone visits a webpage hosted on your server? Is it a specific page? At first thought, it sounds like a load or IO issue related to something that could be optimized or might need a configuration tweak.

If you're on a linux box, install systat and keep an eye on the info as you hit the server. On windows, you can use perfmon.msc and add the idle % under the physical drive category.

Things you'll want to look for is excessive read/writes to the disk or a process which is taking an abnormal amount of CPU time or memory.

If it's a specific page causing the problem, hit the page and see what processes react(*SQL, Apache/IIS, php, perl, etc) while watching the log files for your HTTP daemon. Also, keep in mind that the culprit page could be used as parts of other pages via frames, iframes, includes, etc.

Also, it might not seem related, but make sure your DNS resolutions aren't taking an excessive amount of time. If they are, check your recursive DNS settings. The Planet's DNS Servers are available for use.

You should never mix game servers and web hosting on the same box.

I would get some MRTG's setup to poll differnt information such as ram, disk, proc etc... This will help you see if anything hardware related is spiking. You will also want to watch your diskio as stated. I would do everything possible first to rule out physical server problem then start wondering whats going on at the network level if everything is correct.