[CentOS] home directory server performance issues

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 11:37:50AM -0600, Matt Garman wrote:
> OS is CentOS 5.6, home directory partition is ext3, with options 
> “rw,data=journal,usrquota”.

Is the data=journal option really wanted here? Did you try with the 
other journalling modes available? I also think you are missing the 
noatime option here.

The wiki has some information about raid math and ext3 journalling 
modes: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Disk_Optimization


> At one point, our problems were due to a random user writing a huge
> file to their home directory.  

This is the case in data=journal mode; the server has to write the data 
twice on disk.

-- 
Nicolas