OS X Server Performance tuning

[snarfquest]

I have OS X Server on a Powermac 2008 3,1 with 16GB ram and multiple external raid 5 disk arrays.

I've noticed that OS X Server is only using 3-5GB of ram and very minimal CPU usage. Yet I've got 6 other Macs doing timemachine backups, video playback, DVD ripping, etc. I would think that I have a lot of ram being wasted and not being used for disk cache. I've google searched my butt off and have not come across anything meaningful that explains tuning for disk i/o. So I pose my question here. How do I make this Macpro OSX Server wicked fast...

 

[talmy]

I can't speak directly about your system (a Power Mac in 2008?) or the version of Server you are using (you don't say) but I can say that my server (a Mac mini with 8GB RAM) was using all "free" RAM for disk caching. I could tell because randomly accessing data in files smaller than the free RAM was occurring much faster than the disk access speed, basically saturating my gigabit Ethernet. I went to Mountain Lion + Server and didn't check this, but performance seems the same so I expect it is doing this as well. AFAIK Mac OS X just does this.

I also have 6 other Macs doing basically what you are doing and the mini handles it without showing much CPU usage.