Dan Armbrust wrote:
> Do the other processes do much disk IO?  Maybe it's your disk that 
> can't keep up.  Nice doesn't have much effect when a process uses up 
> all the disk IO.
>
> If you have multiple disks, you could try moving files around such 
> that the files being served by smb are on a different disk that the 
> others (and also a different disk than the system install)
>
> Dan
Yes, the other processes are doing almost nothing but disk IO.

The samba processes are serving data from a separate RAID group, and 
separate bunch of disks. The Apache processes are serving data and 
munging data on the OS RAID group. These RAID groups do share a common 
controller, but they are on different channels.

Disk setup on server:

RAID group 0
(2) 36G U320 7200k SCSI disks in RAID 1 configuration
contains system OS

RAID group 1
(6) 300G U320 10k SCSI disks in RAID 5 configuration
contains audio files only

-- 
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where 
they're going and hook up with them later. 
 - Mitch Hedberg