How do I diagnose a bottleneck in an Intel Atom based Ubuntu server?
- by Jon Cage
I have a small media server at home which has software raid and a gigabit link to the rest of my network.
For some reason though, I only get ~10MB/s transfers when copying to/from the server.
I use software RAID5 (mdadm) over 4 1TB disks. On top of that I then use LVM to give me a huge pool of disk space which is then split up into multiple partitions which can be resized as and when they need it. I'm guessing this it most likely the cause, but I'd like to know for sure where the root cause is.
So, how can I benchmark network throughput (Windows 7 desktop <- Ubuntu server) and hard disk performance to try and identify where my bottleneck might be?
[Edit] If anyone's interested, the motherboard is an Intel Desktop Board D945GCLF2. So that's a 300 series Atom processor with the Intel® 945GC Express Chipset
[Edit2] I feel like such a fool! I just checked my desktop and I had the slower of the two onboard NICs plugged in so the server is probably not at fault here. Transferring a copy of ubuntu off the server I get ~35-40MB/s according to Windows 7. I'll do those HD tests when I get a chance though (just for completeness).
