Mysql Performance issues on BSD4.9

[Tom Arnold]

I'll try to give background and be as brief as possible.
Hardware : Dell 2650, dual 2.4ghz Xeon, 3gigs RAM.

Original configuration
BSD4.8
Raid 1+0 ( or is it 0+1 ) using onboard Perc3 controller. ( 4 70gig drives )
plus an additional 70gig drive in the 5th slot.  Raid was full so we added
the 5th drive and expanded the Mysql database onto it.  Speed was
"tolerable"

New configuration
BSD4.9
5x140gig drives ( 15k LVD ) on same Perc3 controller.

Raid5 - Way incredably painfully slow.  Slave DB would take days to catch up
with Master.

Raid0+1( or is it 1+0 damn adaptec ) + 3 seperate disks.  All on Perc3
controller. - Still slow.  We've used the pair of mirrored disks as the boot
disks and the mysql DB is broken up across the 3 seperates.  The machine is
still sluggish.  I'll paste a systat -v at the end of the message.

I'm going to apologise right off with not being more detailed about what I
mean by "slow" and "sluggish".  If you can tell me more detail to look for
I'll be happy to supply.

Now, my theories for you to poke holes in.
1. The original configuration was speed-tolerable because it was basically
one large logical drive ( ignoring the standalone drive we added ) and it
was smaller drives.
2. The RAID5 configuration was dirt-slow because its Raid5 and you take a
large performance hit ( 4X normal write time? ).
3. The RAID10+3XStandalone is slow because now we have 4 seperate drives ( 1
logical 3 physical ) going via the same controller.
4. Optimal speed for this would be, say, 14 smaller ( 36 or 70gig ) drives
in RAID10.  This is kind of my silver bullet solution based on experiences
running INND all those years ago.

Here's a Systat -v from the Raid10 + 3 seperate drive configuration.
Thanks!

Mem:KB    REAL            VIRTUAL                     VN PAGER  SWAP PAGER
        Tot   Share      Tot    Share    Free         in  out     in  out
Act 1222516    2156  1303312     3476  109292 count
All 3081632    4680  3870300     8488         pages
                                                     2085 zfod   Interrupts
Proc:r  p  d  s  w    Csw  Trp  Sys  Int  Sof  Flt        cow    3824 total
    20     2105     12916 382639428 3824 5984 2109 252952 wire        ata0
irq14
                                                  1239708 act    2881 bge0
irq11
15.8%Sys   1.5%Intr  1.2%User 19.6%Nice 61.9%Idl  1484452 inact   486 aac0
irq16
|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |     104520 cache       fdc0
irq6
========+----------                                  4772 free        atkbd0
irq
                                                          daefr   201 clk
irq0
Namei         Name-cache    Dir-cache                     prcfr   256 rtc
irq8
    Calls     hits    %     hits    %                     react
       72       72  100                                   pdwake
                                                          pdpgs
Disks aacd0 aacd1 aacd2 aacd3  acd0   fd0   md0           intrn
KB/t  59.64 64.00 64.00 64.00  0.00  0.00  0.00    197120 buf
tps      11    97    76    61     0     0     0       145 dirtybuf
MB/s   0.63  6.05  4.76  3.79  0.00  0.00  0.00    199064 desiredvnodes
% busy    1    56    57    39     0     0     0     49766 numvnodes
                                                    37974 freevnodes

-- 
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 - Tom Arnold -       When I was small, I was in love,                  - 
 - Sysabend   -       In love with everything.                          -
 - CareTaker  -       And now there's only you...                       - 
 --------------         -- Thomas Dolby, "Cloudburst At Shingle Street" -