Thanks for the clues. In this case the storage is not on a SATA disk, rather is it on a GPFS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_General_Parallel_File_System) mount. This thing is capable of quite a lot more I/O bandwidth. I invoked `wc` on a large file and it took the "bi" stat of `vmstat` over 16000. The iostat utility is not installed there, I will look into that.
Regarding your suggestions how to improve, I suspect I will not be able to put fldrcv in a RAM table. "SHOW TABLE STATUS" says the data_length of fldrcv is about 2 GB. I will look into your other suggestions. Thanks! Mike Spreitzer
