Minimizing disk I/O with DirectAdmin

DirectAdmin does quite a few things, many of which require a fair amount of disk read/writes.

If your disk is experiencing high I/O, cause a bottleneck in your system's performance, there are a few things you can do to reduce the disk access during various tasks DirectAdmin does.

1. Backup: Enable direct_imap_backup so email data directly added into the tar.gz backup file, rather than being copied first.
2. Backup: Disable the backup_hard_link_check=0, but ENSURE you have strict_backup_permissions=1 enabled.  Without the hard-link checks, you *must* run backups in strict mode, so tar.gz files are created as the User.
3. Backup: a more complex solution is to use rsync for /home data to a remote box, and use the DA backups for everything else (restores are more difficult, and only saves a single copy)
4. Backup: add a load checker before the backups are run, which waits for a lower load, or will abort.
5. Tally: Use the simple_disk_usage so it only relies on system quotas (apache owned files would not be found)
6. Messages: keep your message system pruned by automatically deleting old messages and tickets.  An oversized list of messages/tickets can really down DA's ability to add new messages to the list.  If you trust your IP blocking is working, you can also prevent those messages from being added in the first place.
7. FileManager: don't count folder usage
8. Email Accounts page: Use a usage cache for the email list