on Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 07:28:19AM -0700, Richard Weil (rcweil@yahoo.com) wrote:
> --- "Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > I'm trying to find out why my disk performance is so slow -- 150x
> > worse than a comperable system -- and what I can do to improve it.
> >
> > I've got a system with a painfully slow disk. The worse as it's
> > serving as a Samba server for a small domain (ten workstations).
> > Saturated 802.1g WiFi is disk-starved presently. System response
> > under any I/O load is glacial. 'top' routinely reports load
> > averages of from 2 to 10+ with 99% idle CPU. Memory utilization is
> > generally nominal, and was *not* an issue in the tests below, though
> > disk performance pretty much precisely sucked.
<...>
> If this isn't a problem that suddenly manifested itself,
I don't believe it is, though I didn't take measurements right at the
start. It's certainly been slow for a couple of months, though just how
bad wasn't readily apparent until I really looked at it. The system
itself is hardly older than that.
> it might be the ide cable to the drive.
If you're talking about the 40 vs. 80 conductor drive cables, it's the
latter. That's among the first things I checked last night.
> I had a drive running slowly (a Maxtor, too) and just got a big
> improvement in it's performance by using a new cable. I got a round
> ATA133 cable for $4.00 and the drive's performance radically improved.
This is flat 80-conductor cable.
> I knew it was the cable, though, because the drive had been running
> fast in a nearly identical system with the only real difference being
> the cable. Also, though you probably know more about than I do, the -I
> flag of hdparm is pretty useful for info.
Trying to interpret all of that, but yeah.
> Richard
Thanks.
> > The results may be seen at:
> >
> > http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/slow-drive/
> >
> > Comparative results for a fast system similarly configured (but
> > different HW) is at
> >
> > http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/slow-drive/fast-drive.tar.gz
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.
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