> 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.

That could be.

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

iostat vm gives the following:

      tty            cpu
 tin tout us ni sy in id
   0  425 74  0 22  0  4

iostat -I vm gives the following:

      tty            cpu
 tin tout us ni sy in id
2752 9782090 74  0 22  0  4

I am really not sure how to interpret what either of these reading mean.

> 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.

I did not think of that. Thank you for the suggestion. I will do that
once compiling finishes. I should mention that the values for iostat vm
are while compiling a current snapshot.

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

All filesystems have softdep enabled.

Bryan