Comcast recently doubled my download speed to something close to 12 mbit/sec. Now I/O bottlenecks are becoming apparent.
My server has PCI bus controller cards for two hard drives and the external network. The local net and the other drives use motherboard connectors. Processor is an AMD 6000+ dual core with 8GB memory.
I can run a compute bound process such as Dhrystone with no noticeable effect on download speed. However, an i/o intensive progrma such as quickpar or unrar accessing data on local disks served by the PCI interface board slows incoming data to hafe or a third of normal.
Is the PCI bus that easy to saturate?? Any inexpensive ways to relieve the bottleneck(s)?