I saw that you mentioned using /dev/sda. For a system like this with all that you are doing I'd recommend multiple SCSI drives and a good high performance SCSI controller with as many channels on it as you can get.
Mmmm I wish. The sda is the mount point for the 150GB SATA drive I have. I only have the one - it's not a server I'm working on... this is my desktop computer at work. The servers are all dual Itaniums or better (running SLES9 or SUSE 9.3 Pro)... desktops are much lower spec... no capital justification for RAID etc. on the desktops even though everyone in the team would love to have that... we're just glad that we're all allowed to run Linux :-) But I can do things like increase my /swap... which I will be doing today actually. I experimented onmy test machine at home yesterday - taking into account the advice I got here... and it wasn't as hard as I feared. I did kind of bodge up my mount points, but a quick edit in the fstab fixed that. So at the end of the day today I'll resize my partitions and hope I get it right :-) C.