That's why I asked what kind of Controler the board had on it in a previous post to you and stated ram was not the suspect problem. IMO if you keeped the dual core proc and just switched to ICH7 Board you would have saved money. Your utilization rate would probly stayed the same or no higher than %30. Just to keep things in balance you will probly want to try the cfq schedular with a high user load so every thing gets it fair share in time_wait. Some people will contradict that it's about making the users happy. When access time for one user takes longer than another then the complaints start coming in. I would like to know the Proc Utilization per core or are you running it in Single Core?
top - 11:53:39 up 2 days, 9:47, 1 user, load average: 8.27, 13.66, 29.82 Tasks: 188 total, 1 running, 183 sleeping, 0 stopped, 4 zombie Cpu0 : 10.6% us, 2.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 87.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu1 : 8.0% us, 2.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 88.3% id, 1.7% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu2 : 11.6% us, 2.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 86.4% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu3 : 6.0% us, 0.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 92.4% id, 1.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 4151316k total, 3438536k used, 712780k free, 428520k buffers Swap: 2031608k total, 8k used, 2031600k free, 1839452k cached
I do see on occasion CPU load jump up to 30-60% accross the board but that is rare. Mostly it looks like above.
I will try switching back too CFQ this evening to see what that does for 24 hours. I suspected it was either the SATA controller or the scheduler that fixed/helped things. With the quad-core I figure that at least I will never have to worry about the CPU being a bottle neck. I still see the load average jump up at peak times to as much as 60 percent but its a rare event now. When I did a grep on a 450Mbyte file it jumped to 90 earlier.
Matt