< Not to take this off-topic, but I'd make sure you understood what < problem you were fixing first. Deciding where the bottleneck is (if < there is one) shouldn't be hard with vmstat and iostat. Ok I have done some vmstat an iostat reports an pasted the output into a text file. I'm not sure what to make of them so Im posting them to see if chris Cameron or someone else can maybe tell where the problem is now. If you need more info let me know an i will post back to list if its before 3:30 cst here. Here the results of the reports of vmstat an iostat some vmstat info : horizon:~ # vmstat -s 1023880 total memory 881536 used memory 375760 active memory 447496 inactive memory 142344 free memory 55436 buffer memory 678348 swap cache 1052216 total swap 56736 used swap 995480 free swap 634041 non-nice user cpu ticks 578 nice user cpu ticks 117721 system cpu ticks 10163063 idle cpu ticks 185059 IO-wait cpu ticks 1439 IRQ cpu ticks 27655 softirq cpu ticks 45926850 pages paged in 7087080 pages paged out 197249 pages swapped in 327471 pages swapped out 164517155 interrupts 50965356 CPU context switches 1106568916 boot time 760282 forks horizon:~ # iostat -c Linux 2.6.8-24.5-default (horizon) 01/25/05 avg-cpu: %user %nice %sys %iowait %idle 5.69 0.01 1.32 1.66 91.33 horizon:~ # iostat -d Linux 2.6.8-24.5-default (horizon) 01/25/05 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn hda 0.00 0.10 0.00 10716 0 sda 11.61 819.57 127.05 91853870 14239632 sdb 0.00 0.02 0.00 1704 0 fd0 0.00 0.00 0.00 4 0 horizon:~ # iostat -p Linux 2.6.8-24.5-default (horizon) 01/25/05 avg-cpu: %user %nice %sys %iowait %idle 5.69 0.01 1.32 1.65 91.34 Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn hda 0.00 0.10 0.00 10716 0 sda 11.61 819.15 127.03 91854398 14243968 sda1 4.68 14.10 23.36 1580672 2619768 sda2 20.42 804.85 103.66 90251094 11624200 sdb 0.00 0.02 0.00 1704 0 fd0 0.00 0.00 0.00 4 0 thanks jack