Monitor Disk Usage (Unusual Load Avgs)

[Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P.]

Steven Adams wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Server specs
>
>Dual p4 xeon 2.4 (4virtual cpus)
>1gig ecc ram
>5x 36gig 10k rpm scsi on a ami megaraid
>
>I only host a few web sites on this server which at the most peak hour of
>times there is only about 6-7%cpu usage. For some reason my load avg's will
>jump from 0.05 to 0.98 even to 1.50 when the cpu is only using 3%.
>
>I am thinking something is using the hard drive as I have load avg peaks of
>6.0-7.0.
>
>I want to find out what is causing this as im curious to why they get so
>high. 
>
>Does anyone know how to find out what running processes are using the
>harddrive or something like that??
>
>Also how do I check if DMA mode is enabled, I know there is a hdparm in
>linux but I cant find anything like that for freebsd..
>
>Thanks for you help
>Steve
>  
>

As for that last, I'm sure there are probably several
ways, but I'm a simpleton.  Why not:

% dmesg | grep DMA
atapci0: <SiS 962/963 UDMA133 controller> port 0x4000-0x400f,0x374-0x377,
                   0x170-0x177,0x3f4-0x3f7,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 2.5 on pci0
ad0: 38166MB <ST340014A> [77545/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA100

Hrmm, I need to see if my disk'll go faster ... ;-)

Kevin Kinsey

PS > Incidentally, what's up with this?

% finger drift at freebsd.org
[freebsd.org]
finger: drift: no such user

I'm leaving that address in, just in case something's
not quite right with finger(1)*, but whassup if it's
*correct*??

(*which is entirely possible, I suppose)