On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 11:04:03PM -0700, Bryan Vyhmeister wrote:
> I have recently built a single Xeon 2.4 GHz system based on a Supermicro
> X5SS8 motherboard along with an Adaptec 2010S Zero Channel Raid card. I
> am using two Seagate 36 GB, 10,000 RPM, Ultra320 SCSI hard drives in a
> RAID 1 setup. I have 1GB of ECC DDR RAM installed.

This certainly should be fast.

Others have made various suggestions that, while generally good
ideas, don't go far enough to explain the kinds of performance
issues you are seeing.

Something is very wrong, perhaps a driver issue with the disk
controller, perhaps something like interrupt mappings or handling.

Check "iostat vm" for something firing runaway interrupts.  What
state is the cpu spending time in when you see slowness?

Play with kernel options for PCIBIOS_* and ACPI_* and ioapic. Given
the machine has HTT, try an MP kernel for comparison.  Fiddle some
BIOS config options.

As another offering in the "shouldn't make *that* much difference"
category: Do you have softdep enabled for the the filesystems?

--
Dan.