Quick few questions re Zentyal...Sluggish? and Free?

[MojoTojo]

Hi Guys

I've been looking for a free/open PC based router/firewall/server , and w/ my research i narrowed it down to 3.. PFSENSE ClearOS and Zentyal.. i've been thru extensive testing and getting used to w/ PFsense and ClearOS.. now i'm trying out Zentyal....

First impressions where, Zentyal is definitely the "not easiest" and "takes more time" in the installation deparment.. but luckily i survived it hehe. specially that DHCP blunder where it wont start.. resisted posting on the forums till i found the answer and there it was, i had to create a range or it wont start.. w/c i found VERY ODD.. lol never encountered this on any router system bfore..

Anywho, for now there are 2 things on my head..


1) I was expecting this to be "light" on the hardware.. i have an ATOM single core proc, 2GB ram on 80GB hard drive.. and darn this Zentyal is slow on it.. installation took a while (even considering it had to Ubuntu Server w/ it) .. but most annoyingly, the webGui is SLUGGISH.. almost non responsive at times specially accessing the dashboard, the modules list, etc.. while some pages they are fast , mostly it's slow.. specially when SAVING something.. i'd wait anywhere between 10 second to almost a minute! heck i was accessing websites faster than the webGui would refresh.. lolz .. i also tried the webGUI on the box itself and it's the same thing..

IS THIS NORMAL on my hardware? I mean i know it's not a very fast hardware but i didnt expect it to be this sluggish...

Forget the minimum requirements, what is the usual hardware specs you guys run this thing on?


2) I thought Zentyal was FREE .. but why are updates available only to paid customers? and if i do subscribe to the free subscription it tells me it's for testing environments only.. meaning i can't legally deploy it in our office and stuff??  or have I misunderstood something here?


Regards to all!

[javivazquez]

[...]
2) I thought Zentyal was FREE .. but why are updates available only to paid customers? and if i do subscribe to the free subscription it tells me it's for testing environments only.. meaning i can't legally deploy it in our office and stuff??  or have I misunderstood something here?

Zentyal Server is open source software and free (as free beer).

Regarding to software updates, you have 2 options:
1) Updates from the community: free (as free beer).
2) Quality Assured updates from our repository: included with Zentyal subscriptions, which also bundle value-added services such as alerts and reports and central management:

http://www.zentyal.com/en/services/subscriptions/

Why should someone pay for Quality Assured updates? Well, as you know, Zentyal Server depends on Ubuntu Server packages. When those packages are updated by Ubuntu, they could cause Zentyal Server to stop working (features failing or downtime), so we run semi-automatic functional and integration tests to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

That's the reason we recommend purchasing subscriptions for productions environments, for the peace of mind when updating your Zentyal Server.

Let me know if my response has been helpful.

Kind regards,
javivazquez

[peso7]

Hi

But there's still the question #1: Why is the web interface so slow on a atom CPU (I got P3-800 MHz CPU and experience the same)?

best regards, Peter

[Joeg1484]

The web interface is slow on a Dual Core 3.4gig processor too.

What I found out was log files get rather large and for some reason aren't rotated as they should be. You have to modify the logrotate.conf and .d directory to change this behaviour.

Also, add as much memory as you can to your server and the performance issues should be allot better. I have 1.3 gigs in my server and keep my log files clean and its still not as snappy as Webmin or other web interfaces are, but it is much better then stock.

On another note, index your ldap database or you will see things like this in your debug file.

Code: [Select]

slapd[1270]: <= bdb_equality_candidates: (uidNumber) not indexed
slapd[1270]: <= bdb_equality_candidates: (mail) not indexed
slapd[1270]: <= bdb_equality_candidates: (mail) not indexed
slapd[1270]: <= bdb_equality_candidates: (uidNumber) not indexed

If you have a lot of users on your system and your ldap database is not indexed, this will drastically hamper performance.

Check out this thread on the Ubuntu forums for more information : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6446142

There is also much more information on this on the Internet. Make sure you know what you are doing before messing with the ldap database, however. I am surprised that its not indexed out of the box. But this might be something the paid folks get .

Hope this helps!
Joe

[Trym]

But there's still the question #1: Why is the web interface so slow on a atom CPU (I got P3-800 MHz CPU and experience the same)?

This is a question I would have liked answered as well. If some time has passed since your last login to the webinterface, it will take at least 10 seconds from you push the "Enter"-button till the webconfigurator-page actually gets served.

I you run top in a shell when logging in, you will see that in fact nothing is happening, the processors are just idling, and there is no hard-disk activity to speak of either. It seems Zentyal is just waiting for some external event to happen before it can go on, or is waiting for messages from some subsystem before it times out. I really don't know, but I do know it's very annoying and unproductive.

If anybody knows if anything can be done about it, please respond.

::Trym

[Escorpiom]

This is a question I would have liked answered as well. If some time has passed since your last login to the webinterface, it will take at least 10 seconds from you push the "Enter"-button till the webconfigurator-page actually gets served.

I you run top in a shell when logging in, you will see that in fact nothing is happening, the processors are just idling, and there is no hard-disk activity to speak of either. It seems Zentyal is just waiting for some external event to happen before it can go on, or is waiting for messages from some subsystem before it times out. I really don't know, but I do know it's very annoying and unproductive.

If anybody knows if anything can be done about it, please respond.

::Trym

Exactly the same thing here. About a year ago I was doing some tests to see if we could use Ebox as our network gateway.
I did not pay that much attention to the slow responding web interface because the tests were done on a P3-1000Mhz/Intel 810 system.
I figured it was because of the below spec machine and that it would be different on the final production system.
Wrong! Now Zentyal is running on a Core2Duo E6750 with 4GB of DDR2 memory and it's still slow as described in Trym's quote.

I like Zentyal a lot because it's loaded with stuff. But it has some issues.
As a n00b I depend heavily on the docs and the forum, but sorry the forum leaves most questions unanswered and the docs are not that detailed.
I really had a hard time get it running, and when it comes to issues like this one I'm totally lost.   

Escorpiom.   

[J. A. Calvo]

Regarding the responsiveness of the interface, it depends a lot on the hardware, the sets of modules you have installed/enabled, and your configuration (number of users, vifaces, etc).

In the development of 2.1, which has already started, we are focused in the performance improvements along with usability improvements, but the performance ones are going first, and a first version will be released soon. The installation speed has been also increased.

The LDAP indexes are going to be automatically created also in 2.0, it is already done although not released yet. But anyway you can enable them by hand: http://trac.zentyal.org/wiki/Document/HowTo/LDAPoptimization

We'll also have a look at the logrotate stuff, but I'm not sure if it is related with the responsiveness of the interface.

[Trym]

Regarding the responsiveness of the interface, it depends a lot on the hardware, the sets of modules you have installed/enabled, and your configuration (number of users, vifaces, etc).

Of course that hardware matters for the tasks the server is actually doing, but the waiting period is roughly the same on a quad-core 3.4GHz as on an 800MHz machine. As I said, the machine is doing *nothing* while waiting for the webconfigurator to present.

It's obviously a design issue. A have a theory about what is happening.

After you log in to the webinterface, zentyal starts a few timers for refreshing the widgets on the dashboard. It seems the first presentation of the dashboard does not happen until the first timer has expired. It then presents the dashboard for the first time, using stale data. (It will list expired DHCP-leases and disconnected VPN-connections among other things.)

Only at the next refresh does it update with correct data. Also, it seems that the different widgets have different timers. The DHCP-widget takes a longer time to get it's correct data updated than the VPN-widget for example.

Should be an easy task to just collect all relevant data and display them immediately upon login.

::Trym

[Joeg1484]

Regarding the responsiveness of the interface, it depends a lot on the hardware, the sets of modules you have installed/enabled, and your configuration (number of users, vifaces, etc).

In the development of 2.1, which has already started, we are focused in the performance improvements along with usability improvements, but the performance ones are going first, and a first version will be released soon. The installation speed has been also increased.

The LDAP indexes are going to be automatically created also in 2.0, it is already done although not released yet. But anyway you can enable them by hand: http://trac.zentyal.org/wiki/Document/HowTo/LDAPoptimization

We'll also have a look at the logrotate stuff, but I'm not sure if it is related with the responsiveness of the interface.

Thanks for the information on the LDAP optimizations!

I found if I rotate the logs more aggressively so they are not so large it does help with caching and memory usage and improves system performance on my system. May not be relevant to everyone though but its something to tweak at least a little to squeeze some performance out.

I do see allot of errors in various logs causing some of them to creep up over 2 megs in size (over 10 in some cases) before rotation and have another forum post about them to which no response had been posted yet. Maybe you can take a look at these too?

Thanks again!
Joe

[Escorpiom]

Great to hear that the performance might improve! Can't wait until the 2.1 release.
In my case, a lot of modules are not active yet because Zentyal was installed only three days ago.
For example voip, mail and office stuff is not yet activated, only the network, firewall, proxy and dns modules are working. Basically just the gateway.
And even in this setup the web interface it is rather unresponsive.

I'm sure the machine on which Zentyal runs has sufficient horsepower.
I might add that the old p3 800 test machine had ClearOS installed and it was way way faster.
Perhaps not a fair comparison (old centOS vs Ubuntu 10.04) but if you focus on the fact that they do more or less the same things, there might be room for improvement.

Cheers. 

[peso7]

Hi Joe

I found if I rotate the logs more aggressively so they are not so large it does help with caching and memory usage and improves system performance on my system. May not be relevant to everyone though but its something to tweak at least a little to squeeze some performance out.

I do see allot of errors in various logs causing some of them to creep up over 2 megs in size (over 10 in some cases) before rotation and have another forum post about them to which no response had been posted yet. Maybe you can take a look at these too?

How can these log be rotated more aggressively?

Thanks for help, Peter

[Joeg1484]

Hi Joe

I found if I rotate the logs more aggressively so they are not so large it does help with caching and memory usage and improves system performance on my system. May not be relevant to everyone though but its something to tweak at least a little to squeeze some performance out.

I do see allot of errors in various logs causing some of them to creep up over 2 megs in size (over 10 in some cases) before rotation and have another forum post about them to which no response had been posted yet. Maybe you can take a look at these too?

How can these log be rotated more aggressively?

Thanks for help, Peter

Hi Peter,

One thing I do is modify the /etc/logrotate.d/ files (and the logrotate.conf file) depending on the log in question and specify daily rotation (If not already specified) and size. So, when the logs reach a specified size, they rotate to a compressed file (To save space as well).

This keeps the log files at a nice small size. This way, system processes that need to read the logs or cache the contents of the logs don't have to spend too much time parsing though them.

Again, this may or may not make a difference for you if you have a lot of ram, but my system is a little lacking in the ram department .

As a note, the Linux kernel will cache inodes and other file data in extra ram and is supposed to free this ram as applications need it. However, all this swapping in and out of ram takes process time and causes system latency. You can change this behavior with swappieness and vfs_cache_pressure settings (Among a few others) to help with system performance as well. Google these to get some more information on how to improve system memory performance. There is quite a bit you can do to make your system snappier via kernel tuning.

Thanks!
Joe

[Plecebo]

I'd really like to see some improvements in the responsiveness of the GUI. I don't think starved hardware is my issue.
16GB of ram (roughly 14GB is available the other 2GB is given to a VM)

Code: [Select]

free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      16465480   16311968     153512          0     205656   13516160
-/+ buffers/cache:    2590152   13875328
Swap:     19787768        212   19787556
8 processor cores

Code: [Select]

grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo
8
which equates to two dual core (with hyperthreading) xeon 3Ghz processors

Code: [Select]

head -n 26 /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 6
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz
stepping : 4
cpu MHz : 2000.000
cache size : 2048 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 6
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est cid cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow
bogomips : 5985.24
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor : 1
With the following zentyal modules installed

Code: [Select]

dpkg -l | grep "ebox-"
ii  ebox-antivirus                   2.0.5                                           Zentyal - Antivirus
ii  ebox-ca                          2.0.3                                           Zentyal - Certification Authority
ii  ebox-dhcp                        2.0.2                                           Zentyal - DHCP Service
ii  ebox-dns                         2.0.1                                           Zentyal - DNS Service
ii  ebox-ebackup                     2.0.10                                          Zentyal - Backup
ii  ebox-firewall                    2.0.1                                           Zentyal - Firewall
ii  ebox-ftp                         2.0.1                                           Zentyal - FTP
ii  ebox-gateway                     2.0                                             Zentyal - Gateway Suite
ii  ebox-ids                         2.0.1                                           Zentyal - Intrusion Detection System
ii  ebox-infrastructure              2.0                                             Zentyal - Network Infrastructure Suite
ii  ebox-l7-protocols                2.0                                             Zentyal - Layer-7 Filter
ii  ebox-mail                        2.0.3                                           Zentyal - Mail Service
ii  ebox-mailfilter                  2.0.2                                           Zentyal - Mail Filter
ii  ebox-monitor                     2.0                                             Zentyal - Monitor
ii  ebox-network                     2.0.8                                           Zentyal - Network Configuration
ii  ebox-ntp                         2.0.1                                           Zentyal - NTP Service
ii  ebox-objects                     2.0                                             Zentyal - Network Objects
ii  ebox-office                      2.0                                             Zentyal - Office Suite
ii  ebox-openvpn                     2.0.7                                           Zentyal - VPN Service
ii  ebox-printers                    2.0.2-1                                         Zentyal - Printer Sharing
ii  ebox-radius                      2.0                                             Zentyal - RADIUS
ii  ebox-remoteservices              2.0.8                                           Zentyal - Zentyal Cloud Client
ii  ebox-samba                       2.0.7                                           Zentyal - File Sharing
ii  ebox-security                    2.0                                             Zentyal - UTM Suite
ii  ebox-services                    2.0                                             Zentyal - Network Services
ii  ebox-software                    2.0.10                                          Zentyal - Software Management
ii  ebox-squid                       2.0.3                                           Zentyal - HTTP Proxy (Cache and Content Filt
ii  ebox-trafficshaping              2.0.3                                           Zentyal - Traffic Shaping
ii  ebox-usersandgroups              2.0.10                                          Zentyal - Users and Groups
ii  ebox-webserver                   2.0.3                                           Zentyal - Web Server
Which is a lot, but not too many for my hardware I would expect.

No significant server load

Code: [Select]

uptime
 10:03:35 up 6 days, 12:02,  1 user,  load average: 0.27, 0.36, 0.37

All this and my interface is quite sluggish. All of the same symptoms previously explained in this thread.

Saving takes a very long time, logging in takes 10-20 seconds, navigating the interface can take 10+ seconds to bring up the proper page.

I mean eventually it works, but using the zentyal web interface is an exercise in patients. So it is good to hear that improvements are in the pipe.

I have to say that even-though the web interface is sluggish, I haven't noticed any issues with sluggishness for the services that zentyal provides. So while it is annoying for the admin, users do not seem to be impacted.

I'm glad to provide more info to help narrow down where the issue lies.

Thanks

[moe12345]

@Plecebo, I have to agree with you here...the stable 2.0.3 release is actually quite responsive re-webmin access and navigation than the 2.1-1 beta. I've tried both and been interchanging over the past few weeks and the non-responsiveness of the web GUI still continues in the beta, sadly. But yeah performance on the connected clients appears not to be affected. I just find it a pain having to wait for "minutes" to navigate between menu items.

[airtonix]

still NO improvements....

visit the admin interface, click accept yes i don't care about invalid cert.

60secs pass

login screen... login

60secs pass

do anything....

change page.

60secs pass



This is stupid!