When disk IO goes bad

[dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

My server lately has been dog slow.  I assumed it had to do with web 
server problems since all I really run is Tomcat and smtp.  Well, I
turned off Tomcat for now.  

The weird thing is that there's basically no load on the machine -- about 
a 0.09 on average.  BUT, whenever I do anything file system related, it 
shoots through the roof.  For example just this morning I copied a 12meg 
file from one directory to another, and the load shot up to 8.0.

What in the world causes THAT?  I mean, sure, it's not the newest hard 
drive in the world, but it never did that before.  Can a drive begin to 
die in such a way that it starts to put more load on the machine?  That 
seems pretty weird to me.  I'm more likely to believe that I've just 
filled up the drive with too many individual files and am now running into 
some sort of inode problem or something.


Duane