Nick, > Is this "wait" state and high LA related to lack of ram and constant > swapping? the disk doesn't sound like its thrashing, but its hard to > tell when its not the only computer in the room.
I have had similar thing happen on some of my servers (and they are not old). It always seems to be related to disk I/O. I've got an Intel SATA RAID controller with a RAID 5 array in one of my servers and I could get the "wait" to almost 100% just by transferring a large file to it. It got so bad that the client application that was sending it files would fail. I had to put a batter backup unit in the RAID controller and change it to "write back caching" mode (I think). Now it works nicely. I just transferred a couple of gigs to it and it showed a "wait" of about 50% -- Later David Kirk
