Hello,
Running VMWare Server 1.0 on a Windows XP host (I know, it's officially unsupported) for testing purposes. Guest OS is Fedora Core 5. The VM is accessing a 100GB virtual disk made of a single large file. The physical disk is a 250GB 7200rpm SATA drive with 16MB of cache.
Whenever I do some large file copy operations, "top" in the guest Linux shows me figures like this:
<-- snip -->
top - 17:33:40 up 1:21, 1 user, load average: 2.52, 2.10, 1.54
Tasks: 71 total, 4 running, 67 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 23.6% us, 29.6% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 46.8% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si, 0.0% st
Mem: 255752k total, 251824k used, 3928k free, 1136k buffers
Swap: 522104k total, 80k used, 522024k free, 218544k cached
<-- snip -->
The high "wa" value of 46,8% makes me wonder! As far as I understand, this means that the system is waiting for some I/O to finish, and this I/O is the disk activity. I guess there are some ways to fine-tune this? Have any of you had similar issues and maybe found good hints to apply?
Thanks!