Hi,
I have a VIA EPIA server (VIA Samuel 2, 600MHz, 256MB DDR RAM) and during times of high harddrive activity (copying big files over the network, azureus checking big files), the server usually becomes unresponsive (time until ssh login appears about ~20 sec worst case) and I get high load averages (up to 6, worst case 8 [then even running uptime takes many seconds]). Overall I get higher CPU activity even for just copying files through samba than I expect.

HDparm says:
Distribution is Debian testing, Kernel:
I do run a lot of services on the server: samba, dns, firewall, dhcp, apache2, azureus (bittorrent client, in console mode). Azureus is a memory-hog being a java program, ps says it uses 35%. But since I've ran all the other services successfully on 128MB ram before, I don't think this is the problem...

Can anyone help me diagnose what could be causing this?

Thanks a lot!

~David

just a guess, is your firewall logging? Azureus can generate A LOT of write on hdd if your firewall is logging everything.

Also, take a look at "dmesg", see if you can find I/O errors of things like this. That would probably mean your HDD is dying and is less and less reliable, resulting and errors and lost of performance.