high iowait

[dsouvik215]

I am running rutorrent on a VPS (Ubuntu 10.04) and have recently been having trouble. When I have just a few torrents running (sometimes even just one), I have a high load average (usually 1.0 to 1.5) and my server is slow to respond. I have (am most) 12 peers per torrent.

It seems that %iowait is at close to 100%! When I look at "top", I am utilizing less than 5% of my CPU.

When I stop all of my torrents, the load average drops to about 0.10.

I have spend several hours searching before making this post and I was not able to come up with a solution. I have been running this setup for about a month and have not had an issue until the last couple of days.

I appreciate any suggestions that anyone has.

 

[das329717]

it sounds like the underlying machine is the problem. Perhaps it's completely over sold.

You might try a better distro, perhaps arch linux or freebsd....Or a dedi.

Without more info it would be hard to really judge the issue but iowait is coming from either:

the network.
the hard drives.

1.0 load isn't high.

 

[dsouvik215]

Well I've emailed tech support for my VPS. I'll post here what they say.

I realize 1.0 it's THAT high, but it seems high when you are only running one torrent! Also the 100% IOWAIT seems high too

 

[das329717]

yah, the i/o wait comes from either the network or the disk. It really depends on how many users are on the box. Lets imagine a quad core server with 8 gb ram and 2 hard drives and a 1Gb/s connection. Now, if you split this 10 ways you could have 10 different vps's sharing the same network connection and disk. now, image the disk is doing something like torrents which can have a pretty high random i/o.

It would be a pretty bad situation. This is what is likely happening on your server. you should stop using a vps and get a dedi.