High CPU Utilization - Apache 2.2.8

[sgunelius]

I've got a vendor-customized VM (see specs below) and we've been plagued with performance problems where the Apache web server (httpd.exe) will consume all available CPU resources on the VM. The environment becomes pretty much unusable and the vendor is unable to provide any guidance as to how to resolve the issue. I can't seem to find a lot of information on tweaking the httpd.conf file to address the problem. Can anyone provide any insight as to how I may reconfigure Apache to play nice or could this be one of those instances where the application just won't operate well on VM? I've never really had a problem running an app on VM until now.

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (SP2)

(2) vCPU

2GB Memory

(1) 10GB virtual disk (C:)

(1) 10GB virtual disk (D:)

I'm not sure if this'll be of any use, but the vendor may have built the environment on a physical server and then used Acronis to image the server before converting to VM. They delivered the VM to me on DVD and I registered it, joined it to our domain and brought it online. We have been able to reproduce the CPU utilization problem during testing. Thank you in advance for your response.

Scott

[weinstein5]

If they converted it I would check the same things if you have donverteded - make sure the HAL is correct, vmware tools is installed and all the physical devices/drivers that are no longer needed are removed - also what hardware are you running this on? Are their other Vms running? Can you try reducing to a single vCPU?

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[sgunelius]

Thanks for the lead regarding the HAL and Devices. I did find an extraneous piece of their AV software (McAfee) identified under the "Non-Plug and Play Drivers" section of Device Manager while looking to see if there were any artifacts from the conversion. I had uninstalled McAfee quite some time ago, but like some other products, it didn't get rid of everything. I manually uninstalled the driver and also ran McAfee's VSCleanupTool to ensure there were no other remnants.

One odd thing I noticed is that this is the only server, virtual or physical, that is running the 5.2.3790.3959 version of the HAL. I have other servers running the same OS version and SP, but they list the HAL version as 5.2.3790.1830. I'm monitoring another test to see if the system performs better now that McAfee has been evicted. If it's still performing poorly, I'll downgrade the HAL to 5.2.3790.1830 and try again. Thank you.

Scott

[SchulieBug]

Scott, did you find a solution for this issue? We've got a similar problem, so we are curious about a possible solution?

[DeaconZ]

Yes, I'm having a similar problem with Apache on a Windows 2008 R2 VM.

Uninstalled SVGA II driver from the tools, and also removed the E1000 nic and used VMXNet3.