Re: [cobalt-users] Anonymous FTP - Overload

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 4/4/00 1:04 PM, IDM Computer Solutions, Inc. at idm@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have a RAQ2 with 64 MB Ram.  I rent this, it's not actually on site.
> 
> My primary purpose is to support a single site which gets several thousand
> visitors per day and a lot of anonymous downloads.
> 
> When I release a new version of my software my site receives a lot of
> traffic as in the case today.
> 
> For most of the day users have complained that they can not FTP the files.
> 
> I have allowed anywhere from 150-1000 concurrent anonymous users yet at any
> time using 'ps' I only see 20-40 (max) proftpd processes running and the
> xferlog shows certainly no more activity.
> 
> Meanwhile, I have verified it's almost impossible to download the files.  I
> get various messages from the site not found with FTP to the File not found.
> 
> Earlier in the day I had an error that there were too many files open and I
> changed the setting for this from 1024 to 3072 and restarted the FTP server
> (I know it may not be necessary).
> 
> If anyone has any information relating to this I would appreciate it.

Have you tried connecting to the FTP server FROM the ftp server to make sure
its functioning properly?  I would try telnetting/sshing to the machine,
then ftp to localhost and see how it performs--this will take the network
out of the equation.

I think the machine should be able to handle 40 users fairly well, but do
not have direct experience with that large of an FTP site.

The reason I would wonder is 40 users at 2-10k/sec would put your bandwidth
usage at about 80-400k/sec constant--eating up 1-3 T1s.  Are you
expereincing a bottleneck or perhaps a lot of packetloss?  That could cause
a lot of problems.

-k