Re: [bitfolk] vps ping response times

Hi Joseph, On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:14:43AM +0100, Joseph Heenan wrote: About a month ago I was made aware of a problem with occasional spikes of high latency, and on looking into it, it became apparent that it had actually been the case for a long time - perhaps years - without anyone really noticing. What you're seeing is one or two packets out of every couple of hundred being delayed somewhere, sometimes for hundreds of milliseconds. It isn't restricted to your VPS, or to any one BitFolk server. It seems to be affecting all VPSes, but as I say, it has been doing so for a very long time. Here's a graph that exemplifies the issue: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/9b7cf0ba2197b53c0aeb0f3cff42fb7e.h… Since then I've been trying to work out where it's actually happening, and this has been a long and ongoing process. Firstly, it *is* restricted to BitFolk. Other things hosted at the same colo are not seeing it. Here's something else in the same rack as some BitFolk nodes, connected to the same switches: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/cc1418a68757c0f78c674ca6cd0beabe.h… That lead me to wonder if it could be some form of overloading of BitFolk's VM hosting nodes. I feel like I have by this point discounted that possibility though, because I have been emptying off the node "curacao" to the point where it now has just two VPSes left on it, one of which is the "pingtest" VPS above, which still shows the issue. So it's hard to believe that it can be overloading. Then I wondered about proxy ARP. I worked with our colo provider to restrict the amount of IP addresses that their routers would ARP for, and we examined packet traces for ARP activity but that proved to be fruitless. So next, is it a problem inherent to Xen? Well, the "penguin" graph above is a Xen-based VPS running on hardware similar to BitFolk's, which was set up by me in a virtually-identical way to how I set up BitFolk's nodes, and it doesn't show the problem. That's where we are at the moment, and I'm continuing to work on this. By tomorrow I'll have moved the last remaining customer off of curacao and then I'll move that node into a different VLAN with other (non-BitFolk) servers that aren't currently experiencing this problem, to see what happens. I'm afraid I can't give you any ETA on when this might be fixed as I still don't know exactly what the problem is. I will keep you informed of progress. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting