When disk IO goes bad

[Jerry Feldman]

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On Thu, 5 Feb 2004 09:26:22 -0500 (EST)
Duane Morin <dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com> wrote:

> My server lately has been dog slow.  I assumed it had to do with web 
> server problems since all I really run is Tomcat and smtp.  Well, I
> turned off Tomcat for now.  
> 
> The weird thing is that there's basically no load on the machine --
> about a 0.09 on average.  BUT, whenever I do anything file system
> related, it shoots through the roof.  For example just this morning I
> copied a 12meg file from one directory to another, and the load shot
> up to 8.0.
> 
> What in the world causes THAT?  I mean, sure, it's not the newest hard
> 
> drive in the world, but it never did that before.  Can a drive begin
> to die in such a way that it starts to put more load on the machine? 
> That seems pretty weird to me.  I'm more likely to believe that I've
> just filled up the drive with too many individual files and am now
> running into some sort of inode problem or something.

You could very well be having a hardware issue. Check your logs, they
should show things like temporary disk failures. I would also do a
complete fsck on each of the disks. And, don't forget to do a df to make
sure that one of your file systems is nearly full. 

Another possibility is to check your swap file and usage. 

- -- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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