Jerry Geis wrote:

every other day I do full backups to both a second internal disk and an external usb disk.

I am using a fully up to date centos 5.1 AMD 64 X2 6400+ machine. with SATA disks. using an NVIDIA chipset,

when I do a full rsync the responsiveness of my machine suffers. Slow on the internal disk and really slow on external usb. doing "top" shows 0% idle but only 17% CPU usage by the rsync command.

I am stunned that a 6400+ machine dual core can get this sluggish when doing a copy to disk. Is there something I potentially have not set right?

dmesg shows my SATA disks at UDMA133 and 1.5 Gbps.

THanks,

Jerry _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Hi

I would recommend you install the systat rpm and then use sar and iostat commands to see if you can identify where the bottleneck is occurring.

Have a nice day

I would recommend you install the systat rpm and then use sar and iostat commands to see if you can identify where the bottleneck is occurring.

I installed sysstat and played with it a little - wasnt getting anywhere. I did some looking last night and came across a kernel tweak echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

This has help the responsiveness during the rsync to the external USB drive which was the worst case.

Thanks,

Jerry