[H-GEN] Debian and booting off a RAID mirror partition

[Benjamin Fowler]

Hi all,

I've built a Debian server on an old HP MediaSmart box. I had the idea of
using software RAID to make things a little more failure-tolerant, however,
the disk throughput is not quite what I had expected initially -- I did
some ad-hoc testing of creating and moving large amounts of data around on
disk.

I'm after some general advice on approaches to doing disk performance
troubleshooting on home hardware:


   - How do I get an idea of what is 'normal' performance for a given
   hardware configuration?
   - What are common misconfigurations under Linux, that would cause poor
   performance? (I realize there's potentially a lot, if you take into account
   low level configuration, e.g. enabling DMA, LVM, software RAID, the
   filesystem driver itself, partition alignment (my disks have 4kb blocks,
   but yes, my partitions are aligned on cylinder boundaries).
   - And last but not least, how do I systematically go about finding and
   fixing these kinds of performance issues?

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

Ben.
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