The Disclaimer: I do not have a technical education and do not make my living administering computers or networks. What I know, I taught myself.
It has been my experience that despite Gigabit Ethernet (are you on a Gigabit LAN?) and 800 Mbs Firewire ports, the bottleneck to getting data in and out of a computer is the internal hard drive. An ATA133 bus can only move data so fast. When a hard drive has to supply both OS system data and data being requested / received over the network, delays start happening.
I suggest a second hard drive and separating your OS and your shares between the two. (One drive would be dedicated to OS X and applications.) You could hang the second drive as a slave on the primary IDE bus for some improvement, but since the bus can only read or write - not both at once - there will still be delays. You could try slaving the second drive to the secondary IDE bus that your CD drive is connected to. That bus is likely a slower ATA100 or even ATA66. Despite the slower bus, you will hopefully see some improvements by separating your OS and shares between two buses.
If this does improve things, consider taking it "to the next level" by adding a new ATA133 PCI card. I don't know if the PCI bus of your G4 would bottleneck a SATA card or not.
I have read stories of people getting performance gains from separating their OS and data by using an external Firewire drive. (Certainly not USB.) I don't know if such a setup would work for a server situation?
It has been my experience that despite Gigabit Ethernet (are you on a Gigabit LAN?) and 800 Mbs Firewire ports, the bottleneck to getting data in and out of a computer is the internal hard drive. An ATA133 bus can only move data so fast. When a hard drive has to supply both OS system data and data being requested / received over the network, delays start happening.
I suggest a second hard drive and separating your OS and your shares between the two. (One drive would be dedicated to OS X and applications.) You could hang the second drive as a slave on the primary IDE bus for some improvement, but since the bus can only read or write - not both at once - there will still be delays. You could try slaving the second drive to the secondary IDE bus that your CD drive is connected to. That bus is likely a slower ATA100 or even ATA66. Despite the slower bus, you will hopefully see some improvements by separating your OS and shares between two buses.
If this does improve things, consider taking it "to the next level" by adding a new ATA133 PCI card. I don't know if the PCI bus of your G4 would bottleneck a SATA card or not.
I have read stories of people getting performance gains from separating their OS and data by using an external Firewire drive. (Certainly not USB.) I don't know if such a setup would work for a server situation?
