On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 at 12:00am, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote[...]
Kris, I think that you need to some performance testing/optimizing of your system. What controllers are you using? Have you tested with bonnie++ and/or tiobench? Are there mount parameters to ext3 you can play with (data=writeback comes to mind)? You may also want to spend some time on bugzilla and see if there's some other kernel-foo you can apply to RH's kernel (I assume you're using RH's kernel -- if not vanilla 2.4.20 is awfully old...) to speed up disk stuff.
Try the most simple tests like "hdparm -tT" if it's possible on that RAID array, also try to doublecheck that all discs are running in DMA mode (hdparm -d) or check the info from your RAID controller.
As I said I'm not sure if it works on your RAID setup, if not you'll need to check the performance with the other tools mentioned.
/Andreas