What to upgrade on server to solve this issue?

We are maintaining a server at a school (each student can log in on one of the public iMacs and each is given several Gigs of space to use). The Mac Pro Server has a quad core Xeon processor with 3GB of RAM and four 750GB HDDs (no RAID), of which 2 HDDs hold the students' data.

The problem we are seeing is when a sizable number of students use the public iMacs around the same time, they would experience heavy lag time. Sometimes a simple task such as opening up Safari browser or MS Word would take a minute or two (these applications are all stored locally on each iMac, but the contents of the desktop such as files stored on the desktop, background pictures that appear right after each log in and so on are stored on the server) All iMacs are connected to the server via a gigabit Cisco switch.

We are not sure what's causing the lag. What should we upgrade to minimize the wait time? Faster CPU? more RAM? change HDD to SSD?

A Mac Pro server with only 3 GB of memory is ridiculous. Get the IT folks at your school to beef up that server by maxing out the memory on it. Speed and hard drive space looks OK. In any event, larger hard drives can be added later if need be.

chscag said:

A Mac Pro server with only 3 GB of memory is ridiculous.

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OUCH!!! I'm sure glad I have 12gig in my Mac Pro...and I don't even need it!

- Nick

Since I came to the school after the server did, I have no idea why it only came with 3GB of RAM. I am very supportive of the idea more RAM the better, but why would more RAM help in this case? I see the server is doing mainly random read when the students are accessing it and just transferring the data over the network. Besides we monitored the server before and saw sizable amount of free RAM so we thought it's not being bottlenecked by the RAM

How often do you run maintenance task on the Server like disk verification and permissions repair

Is it kept up to date and restarted every now and again?

I'm no server pro but from where I sit, there could be two possible bottlenecks: networking and RAM. RAM is a simple fix and where I'd start given the small amount you have in the server. My nearly four year old MB has more memory than that and it's starting to show its age so I can't imagine how much the Xserve is struggling in trying to manage multiple profiles at a time. This might explain why opening applications is slow - although Word and Safari are local, if their respective profiles and preference files are stored on the server, they'll load slowly. Things are only as fast as the slowest moving part.

The second possible bottleneck is the networking. This is a possibility but if everything is local, it may not be all that bad.

The Mac Pro is 2009 model (MacPro4,1), Does it take non-ECC RAM?

All Mac Pro models use ECC memory modules, so the answer is no.