Lester Caine wrote:

> No raid - two ATA133 drives 80Gb and 500Gb - formatted ext3 partitions.
>
> /var directory is on the big drive and the database is being accessed from there.
> Everything else on the smaller drive - / = 8Gb partition - 4Gb swap and the
> balance /home
> Machine has 4Gb ram and the database is only 100Mb
>
> The next question would be how to do performance testing in Mandriva Linux :)

Well, you could do a very basic

$ hdparm -Tt /dev/xxx

Where /dev/xxx is the partition where /var is mounted.

I've got a Slackware 12 rig running with two SATA 300GB disks, and my
results are as follows:

Timing cached reads: 7260 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3635.45 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 184 MB in 3.01 seconds = 61.22 MB/sec

If your results are very low, then you might've found a bottleneck.

Just be careful with hdparm. It's not something you normally should be
messing about with. -Tt should be safe enough though. :o)

Regards,
Thomas