> The first problem came when I raid1'd the two partitions together.  Every-
> thing performs admirably except when it comes to extracting something 
> like pkgsrc.tar.gz.  mkdir(2) calls consume 3500 I/O's and take 17 seconds
> to complete, most of the time:
> 
> 	nlager# time mkdir foo
> 	0.0u 0.6s 0:17.72 3.8% 0+0k 3687+7io 0pf+0w

Not much to say here apart from "me too".  I put a pair of 9GB disks into a
Sparc 4/330 and used about 7G as a raid 1 set.  About 60% through a restore
things ran really slowly - each file would take maybe 10-20 seconds to
appear.  During this time, there was constant disk activity on one or the
other raid disk.  I haven't had a chance to repeat this, as the box is my
main NFS/dialup machine and I wanted to get it back into use.

> The kernel in question is a GENERIC 1.5 with the raid stuff linked in. The
> userland is also generic 1.5 from ftp.netbsd.org.

I'm also using 1.5, although my kernel is somewhat trimmed down.

J

-- 
                    My other computer also runs NetBSD
                          http://www.netbsd.org/