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I have an old compaq proliant dl360 collocated in a hosting facility. It used to run incredibly fast but now it lags and seems to drop requests.

SSH is fine but FTP will often time out, then overwrite the file with nothing losing the file. Very frustrating when it's a code file. I initially thought it may be an issue with apache, as websites either load quickly like the used to, or stall and partially load. It can take up to three or four minutes just to load a 120kB webpage. It has issues displaying files, and this happens randomly, along with the FTP issue so I'm ruling out apache.

I'm not to sure what to do next. Running uptime shows me CPU load is practically sleeping and there's plenty of free memory.

How do I diagnose if there's an issue with the network card or HDD read/writes?

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    Given it is OLDper your workds I would point to the disc. What operating system?
    – TomTom
    Oct 6, 2011 at 15:36

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A possibility to rule out the HDD issue would be to generate a file from /dev/zero and pipe it through nc to another host - it should require minimal disk access. On the server run the following command which will create a 10MB file ($PORT is some arbitrary >1024 port, which should be opened in the firewall):

dd bs=1024 count=10240 if=/dev/zero | nc -l $PORT

On the client run:

time -p nc $IP_OF_SERVER $PORT > out.file

If the transfer is finished in a reasonable amount of time, taking into account the bandwidth from the server to the client, then it may be a HDD issue.

Additionally, look for clues in the output of dmesg and tail -F /var/log/messsages - HDD issues are accompanied by log messages that could give you a bit more insight into what happens.

You could also have MTU issues between the server and the client - try to see what is the maximum MTU you can use on that link with ping -M do -s $MTU $IP_OF_CLIENT and decrease the $MTU from 1472 until the ping is successful.

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