I was recently reminded that Linux's iostat command is what I call'overly helpful'. It's not that it lies to you, exactly; it's that iostat is a little bit too eager to please people reading its output,particularly iostat -x output. There are a number of issues.

(The rest of this assumes that you're familiar with the iostat -x fields.)

The fatally flawed field is svctm , the 'average service time' forIOs. It would be

I spent a chunk of this weekend preparing a mirror for a high loadenvironment. The mirror only needs to serve a couple of largevideo clips , but they're going to be linked from a high traffic website , so we expect a lot of (simultaneous)connections and a lot of outgoing bandwidth.

I made a generic mirror url, using a new hostname that I had to put intoa new sub-zone in our DNS . Right now it has two A records, each with a five minute TTL