[tlug] Disk I/O bottleneck: how to solve?

["Jean-Christian Imbeault" <jean_christian@example.com>]

One of my machines has been showing poor performance lately and I think I've 
pinned the problem down to a hard disk I/O bottleneck.

The hard drive is already pretty fast (ATA-100 7,200 rpm). I only have two 
drives bays and both are in use so trying to speed things with RAID are not 
an option.

I could upgrade the hardware but I don't think there are any faster IDE 
drives (I heard that ATA-133 is really only about 5% faster that ATA-100). I 
*could* go SCSI but since it is a much more expensive option it would need 
to be a big imporvement in speed.

I was wondering if the were any software options? My machine has a lot of 
free RAM and I was wondering if there was any way to make the kernel use 
more RAM as a disk buffer? My machine always has at last 200M of free RAM 
(total of 512M) so using that as a disk buffer could really speed things up.

Is it possible?

If there are other solutions I have overlooked please let me know ofoucrse 
;)

Jc



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