Linux server hangs

[Vishnu Vardhan Reddy]

Dear All,

I just had a really bad experience with one of the IBM Server which
has Red Hat RHEL 4 WS with update 6 OS on it. It has two SATA hard
disks out of which one is of 80 GB( contains /boot, / & swap
partitions) and on other disk 250 GB single partition ( /data).

On this serve I am currently running samba, nfs, ftp services & some
embedded tools, with 20 users who works entirely on this server
through telnet, samba services, and compiles the source on this
related to embedded tools.

My problem is, if all the users are logged in through telnet, ftp and
access data through samba and perform some I/O operations like
copying, moving and deleting data, the server getting hanged for 30
seconds and further becomes slow until the application is closed or
completed, this effects other users terminals.

As per my observation if I copy some 500 MB file from partition to
partition, from disk to disk, or when I start checkout from CVS the
CPU utilization is showing less, but server freezes for some time.
Even I cont open any file through VI, after the application is closed
the server becomes fast, all the users can work with VI editor.

Can anyone help me in this issue?

Thanks
Vishnu