Performance question

[Alan Fiebig]

>Does the below table mean you only have one drive in the system or is it
>just an example?

Yes, it means I only have a single drive

>Are you syslogging to the same physical drive as the one holding your
>queues? Since syslog seems to be a big factor in your performance you
>could ease the load by writing to another physical drive (not just
>another partition). Also, SCSI drives should handle your load better
>than IDE drives.

Yes, I am syslogging to the same physical drive.

I'd be happy to add a second drive for syslog (and anything else anyone
wants to recommend), and even switch to scsi drives.

But, before I do this, I want to categorically know that this is my
problem. That I am IO bound with the single drive.

My server can go for days without backing up. On the days it backs up,
my stats show no additional incomming load, the total daily number of messages
stays about the same. On a day that it does back up, often it will catch up
and the backlog clears.

-Alan