Tuning a system..

[adp]

We have a pretty high load mail server that does AV and spam filtering. I am
looking to perf. tune this machine. It's FreeBSD 4.9-REL and Postfix. I am
trying to correlate the info in systat to things I need to worry about. I am
using systat with vmstat output since that seems to basically show
everything you need to see. By the way, I did read 'man tuning'.

First, I see that my memory is fine:

    3 users    Load  9.75  4.46  3.24                  Mar 15 17:02

Mem:KB    REAL            VIRTUAL                     VN PAGER  SWAP PAGER
        Tot   Share      Tot    Share    Free         in  out     in  out
Act  106712    8704  3036376    30772   35356 count
All  502468   37816  3878800   181488         pages

The major thing I'm looking at is SWAP PAGER:

SWAP PAGER
in   out

I see that I have processes in the run state and 14 waiting on the disk:

Proc:r  p  d  s  w    Csw  Trp  Sys  Int  Sof  Flt
     8    14 77      6305 297429015  950 1863 2293

I have 77 processes sleeping.

I have 0 processes in w state, which means that my CPU isn't having a
problem.

I am spending a lot of time in sys and the rest in user:

49.5%Sys   1.7%Intr 44.5%User  0.0%Nice  4.4%Idl

Here are my disks:

Disks aacd0  acd0
KB/t  13.19  0.00
tps     111     0
MB/s   1.43  0.00
% busy    2     0

>From %Sys I would say that disk is a problem for us. However, I'm having
problems really understanding the numbers for Disks. We are running the
server on RAID-1 (2 disks) IDE. What should I be looking for here?

Here is the right side:

2626 cow     867 total
106472 wire        ata0 irq14
147376 act     464 bge0 irq11
222104 inact   110 aac0 irq7
28304 cache       atkbd0 irq
6992 free    100 clk irq0
daefr   128 rtc irq8
2841 prcfr
react
pdwake
pdpgs
intrn
62032 buf
508 dirtybuf
40239 desiredvnodes
38005 numvnodes
13105 freevnodes