Database performance

["Christopher L. Everett" <ceverett@ceverett.com>]

Hi,

I do a lot of database work.  Sometimes I must do massive batch jobs on 
my box
such as:

 -- multi-gigabyte database dumps and restores
 -- tests over millions of records, searching for overlooked cases
 -- one-off queries for sales & marketing typs that join 8 or 9 tables

The problem is that these things often take 10 to 30 minutes to run on 
my box.
When I use the GNU time utility, I see a low PCPU number, typically 
between 15
and 25%.  CPU utilization viewed through top remains at 35% or so, and I 
never
go deeper than a few tens of kilobytes into swap, even though the 1 
minute load
average climbs to 2 and higher (I've seen peak numbers around 6).

I'm using a single Seagate 40GB ATA-133 as my sole hard drive, and my 
system has
an Athlon 2600 processor and 1 GB of RAM.  Am I correct in thinking that 
the
bottleneck lies in the HD subsystem?

--
Christopher L. Everett

Chief Technology Officer                               www.medbanner.com
MedBanner, Inc.                                          www.physemp.com