Date:        Sun, 29 Apr 2001 09:53:44 -0600
    From:        Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org>
    Message-ID:  <200104291553.f3TFriq20778@lager.beer.org>

  | I saw a similar thing. Turns out the default geometry that raidframe
  | supplies for the raid-set affects performance drastically.  I saw
  | 100% cpu utilization and taking 30 seconds to do a 'mkdir'.
  | 
  | Bill Sommerfeld checked in a fix for this after 1.5.

Bill's fix was for block allocation if I recall correctly (perhaps
I don't).   I didn't think that it would have any affect on stat()
needed for ls -l to work quickly.

  | Check the geometry of the 'disk' in the raid disklabel.  Set it 
  | to something sane.

This is still good advice (though it means newfs'ing the filesystems
on the raid and reinstalling them to be effective of course).

To provide more help, the config of the raid is going to be needed,
how many drives in the raid5, on what busses do they live, what's the
raid config, what are the disklabels of the underlying drives, and of the
raid (and perhaps more).

kre