We really, really need to move the database back to a machine with a decent hard drive. The wikis are very sluggish, and a fair chunk of it's from waiting on the database.
Ursula's sitting around with a 90% idle CPU, but everything's blocked on disk I/O to the point it's got a load average of about 16. At any given time from 8-20 processes are blocked and waiting. Operations that hit a lot of rows like history and watchlist are particularly badly hit since they don't play as well with caching.
If Geoffrin's not going to be up soon, and Pliny's still emitting spurious disk errors, what are our options out of the available machines?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)