busy disks - a lot of write activities on / part

[Tamouh H.]

I'm diagnosing a slow hard disk issues , trying to determine where the bottleneck in all of this. The system is FreeBSD 5.4 with SCSI U320 drives in RAID-5 on Adaptec 2130SLP Controller.

I'm noticing the / boot partition has the most activities for writes/Busy and was wondering if anyone can shed some lights on this and what can possibly be done to speed up the drives.

doing 'gstat' shows:

dT: 0.510  flag_I 500000us  sizeof 240  i -1
 L(q)  ops/s    r/s   kBps   ms/r    w/s   kBps   ms/w   %busy Name
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| acd0
    1    141      6    259    6.6    135   1466  121.0   94.3| aacd0
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd1
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| acd0t01
    1    141      6    259    6.7    135   1466  121.0   94.5| aacd0s1
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd1s1
    1     61      0      0    0.0     61    549   16.6  101.2| aacd0s1a
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd0s1b
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd0s1c
    0     73      0      0    0.0     73    906  205.1   48.6| aacd0s1d
    0      4      2      4    7.9      2     12  242.6   49.1| aacd0s1e
    0      4      4    255    6.1      0      0    0.0    2.4| aacd0s1f
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd1s1c
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd1s1d
    0      0      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0    0.0| aacd1s1e

This is df:

Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/aacd0s1a     809998    59430    685770     8%    /
devfs                  1        1         0   100%    /dev
/dev/aacd1s1e    1722888    14892   1570166     1%    /tmp
/dev/aacd0s1f  209955742 62440662 130718622    32%    /home
/dev/aacd0s1d   35921132  6151076  26896366    19%    /usr
/dev/aacd0s1e   22270798  3480300  17008836    17%    /var
devfs                  1        1         0   100%    /var/named/dev
procfs                 4        4         0   100%    /proc
/dev/aacd1s1d  137099908 70149522  55982394    56%    /backup

Any info on matter of disks performance is much appreciated.

Thx,

Tamouh Hakmi