hi guys,
i have installed red hat 9 on intel p4 3ghz machine, 1 gb ram and 300gb segate sata drive. the problem is the machine is runing slow.

the hdparm gives me the following

# hdparm -t
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 19.38 seconds = 3.30 MB/sec

******

my sata drive configuration is as follows

*****

# hdparm -v -i /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 36481/255/63, sectors = 586072368, start = 0

Model=ST3300822AS, FwRev=3.AAE, SerialNo=4NF11DM4
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=8192kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=268435455
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: device does not report version: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

*****
my kernel configuration is as follows

*****
# ls -l /usr/src
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 25 2003 debug
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 May 25 01:23 linux-2.4 -> linux-2.4.20-8
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 May 25 01:23 linux-2.4.20-8
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 May 25 01:21 redhat

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so please tell me how can i improve the performance of the server.

There's the problem. Firstly, try this:
Although that probably won't work. By default linux turns DMA on so if it's off then chances are your kernel doesn't have the correct drivers for your motherboard. Redhat 9 is like 6 years old so if you're running semi-recent hardware that could very easily be the problem. Try something newer.

thank u cam for the reply,

can i upgrade my kernel to newer version?

Why not upgrade the whole distro? You can update the kernel yes, I don't know if there would be packages for very recent ones though so you might need to build from source but Fedora Core is just the newer version of Redhat for the community, maybe you should go with that.

no cam i cant upgrade the whole distro, i have been through the whole process recently since our server crashed due to file system error, i should have gone for fedora core 4 but one of our manager opted for red hat 9 as the fc4 cds were not quickly available, and we had put our server back online as quickly as possible. so i have to update the kernel how i do that.