> > The programs the client run mostly are > > > > 1. LUCY (http://www.tigr.org/software/) > > Somewhat disk intensive. yes i too noticed it, thats one of the reason i wanted to add 3 small hard drives and put in an RAID 0, and move the current hard disks (146 GB each) to a workstation and make it a file server. > > > 2. GENESEQER (http://bioinformatics.iastate.edu/bioinformatics2go/gs/help.html) > > More CPU intensive. adding one more cpu will definitely improve, but cost is a prob :-( > > > I had ran hdparm > > > > # /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/sda2 > > > > /dev/sda2: > > Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.25 seconds =512.00 MB/sec > > Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.75 seconds = 36.57 MB/sec > > Egad! Thats low.... Yes, I am not sure what is wrong and I am trying to troubleshoot, but the current usage of the server by clients keeps me away from finding the problem. > See if you can adjust the stripe unit on the hardware raid. It would > require rebuilding the raided file system though. Also, look at using > XFS rather than ext3. Currently its striped 2. I thought this number should be equal to no of hard disk and the raid will write files striping to these two hard disks. am i wrong? kindly help me in figuring this out. One of the member in this group (Chris Dagdigian) had also suggested to try XFS. I will definitely try it once i fix with system configuration. > > One thing to do, while others are running, is to use vmstat. Run > > vmstat 1 > $ /usr/bin/vmstat 1 procs memory swap io system cpu r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id 2 0 0 1300 14084 86528 3414408 0 0 98 282 143 266 34 1 65 1 0 0 1300 14404 86528 3412756 0 0 512 52 150 331 97 3 0 1 0 0 1300 14404 86528 3412852 0 0 768 0 133 314 100 0 0 1 0 0 1300 14404 86528 3412820 0 0 768 0 145 315 98 2 0 1 0 0 1300 14404 86528 3412916 0 0 896 0 135 308 98 2 0 1 0 0 1300 14404 86528 3412884 0 0 768 0 147 307 99 1 0 1 0 0 1300 14404 86528 3412852 0 0 768 32 122 317 100 0 0 this was the output, will the swap be used only when the memory is excede the system memory? I am not sure how the other numbers should look like. > Joe > -- Thanks karthik