btw, the most common source of high load is (surprise!) disk I/O. So, moving a /var/log (not just /var) on separate device connected to distinct controller por

btw, the most common source of high load is (surprise!) disk I/O. So, moving a /var/log (not just /var) on separate device connected to distinct controller port is a big deal. If you're running, say, mail server, you should separate /var/spool and /var/log and /var/db/mysql if any. Partitioning, serious network card (think Broadcom) and big CPU caches are good things to begin with.