Small usage of swap memory 333

Peter T. Breuer Peter is right. In looking at your data again, you are spending a lot of time in wait state. No doubt many processes (as shown in, e.g., top) are in D state.

If you find that to be true, you will have to find out which they are (top will tell you), and see why they are doing so much IO and taking so long to do it. Perhaps your file system is poorly organized. If you are doing too much time seeking, you may wish to place things on different drives so as to reduce compebreastion for the head positioners. For database work, for example, I find it very helpful to have many small (SCSI) hard drives instead of one large one. That way, I can have the index on one drive and the data tables on three other drives and I do not have to seek back and forth between the cylinders where the index is and where the various data tables are. Switching from 2 SCSI drives to 4 SCSI drives (all with 8 Megabyte caches in them, all running at 10,000rpm) made comparable tasks run about 8x faster. Part of that was due to switching from ext2 file system to raw file system, but not all. It depends on your dbms whether you can run on raw file systems.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 08:00:00 up 14 days, 23:27, 6 users, load average: 4.02, 4.07, 4.08