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?