OT: Unix stutter

[John Esak]

> Sar was being run by cron.  Normally the cron report would finish
> in less than a minute past the hour, normally just a few seconds.
>
> This time the sar finished at 20 minutes after the hour.  I used to
> keep a printout of that report to show people.  Average disk
> wait was 8300 ms.  That means that instead of the typical 20ms
> during light times, or 40ms during load time, each access to the
> disk took 8 1/3 seconds.  But it finally finished.

Along these lines... I was wondering if my "very_fast" tape backup (the
dedicated 29360 and AIT3) isn't "too" fast... sucking up too many resources,
too quickly, too often... etc.  I suggested "nicing" the process to Frank at
Microlite and he suggested we try to diagnose what was wrong first and he'd
tell me how to nice it later. Since then I never went back to determine the
syntax for nicing it. (I would guess just nicing it on the cron line might
do it??, but he sounded as if there was another prescribed way.)  In any
case, I _am_ going to try that next if sar shows nothing... or maybe if sar
shows something... :-)

Thanks,

John