Performance Tuning and RAID

[Jeff Falgout]

Dual Xeon 2.4s, 2GB Memory, 1 U160 disk -
Red Hat 8.0 running Sendmail as MTA, Sophos, Clam, SA, BIND
NSCD, and Apache (for Mailstats and Mailscanner-MRTG).

I'm sitting here watching my MailScanner box jump up to a load of:

9:58am  up 208 days,  2:00,  3 users,  load average: 8.12, 9.08, 8.12

And I'm only handling 25k messages/day on average (Yesterday I hit
33k)
With the current outbreak, this box shouldn't be breaking a sweat, but
it
is.


iostat shows:
(The second disk, 8-1, is a dump disk not used by the os)

[root at ww11 MailScanner]# iostat 5 5
Linux 2.4.20-18.8smp (ww11.co.jefferson.co.us)  01/27/2004

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys   %idle
          14.21    0.00    3.66   82.12

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
dev8-0           44.48       279.35       247.64 2022819822 1793200872
dev8-1            0.84         0.00       277.22        288 2007401432

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys   %idle
          88.70    0.00   11.15    0.15

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
dev8-0           70.20         0.00      2107.60          0      10538
dev8-1            0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys   %idle
          89.85    0.00    9.70    0.45

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
dev8-0           64.80         0.00      1327.60          0       6638
dev8-1            0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys   %idle
          72.70    0.00   11.40   15.90

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
dev8-0           69.40         0.00      1409.60          0       7048
dev8-1            0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys   %idle
          87.35    0.00   11.30    1.35

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
dev8-0           64.80         0.00      2417.20          0      12086
dev8-1            0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0



I'm considering moving to a RAID 10 config.

Is anyone running MS on RAID 10, and if so what kind of performance
boost did you get. Any other ideas to increase performance.
(I've got noatime set on the log filesystem and
/var/spool/MailScanner/incoming on tmpfs)

Jeff