lsi megaraid problem

[Eric S. Johansson]

using ububtu 6.06

I am using the LSI megaraid 150-4 raid card in one of my systems and is set for 
raid 5.  For some reason that I don't understand, it is running slow. megacli 
reports that all of the physical disks are okay so I'm not sure what's 
happening.  All I know is that this copies take much longer than I think they 
should and the two virtual machines on the system run slow.

if I try to copy something like /usr to a junk directory, the load average on 
the guest OS climbs to roughly 1.5-2 and the host OS load average climbs to 
somewhere over four.  When I look in the virtual machine lawn, I see

Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.146 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.145 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.144 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.143 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.143 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.143 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:49:06: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 2.143 seconds (ok)
Dec 21 00:51:00: vmx| SCSI0:1: Command WRITE(10) took 1.222 seconds (ok)

which really isn't right.  To tell you the truth, I'm not sure if the problem is 
in the virtual machine or the raid card.  I suspect the raid card because I'm 
also noticing similar slowness on another server with a different raid 
controller (HP Proliant ML350 G5 with hp smart array 400 if memory serves).  I 
would appreciate some assistance with figuring out this problem.


---eric