On Fri, 5 Oct 2007 10:07:47 -0400 (EDT), Justin Piszcz wrote:

Yikes, yeah I would get them off the PCI card, what kind of
motherboard is it?  If you don't have a PCI-e based board it probably
won't help THAT much but it still should be better than placing 3
drives on a PCI card.

It's a Tyan Thunder K8S Pro S2882. No PCIe. Though given the fact that
simply patching the kernel (on the RAID fs) when there's no other
disk activity slows to a crawl which I'm fairly sure it didn't used,
certainly these app stalls are new. The only trouble is I don't have
any iostat profile from say a year ago when everything was OK. So I
can't be 100% sure the current thing of spikes of iowait and await etc
didn't actually always happen and it's actually something else that's
wrong.
 

Justin.

Andrew