Both the writing process and anything else I try to do at the same time have biowait. top itself takes several seconds to start up before I can see any output.
On 10 Jan 2012, at 01:48, Chris Cappuccio wrote: > George Steel [li...@netglue.co] wrote: >> >> When writing to the disk(s), the whole system becomes incredibly slow >> until the write operation has finished. I've used dd to make 10GB files >> and then timed simple operations like ls and compared this to other >> OpenBSD servers I've got with single SATA drives - on the machine with >> the RAID card, ls takes 7 seconds to execute and the write operation >> takes 65 sec, on another OpenBSD server I have, the same operation takes >> 0.1 and 90 sec respectively. >> > > When it is blocking, what does the WAIT column in top show for the affected process? Is it "buf_nee" (buf_needva)?
