Just a question. Are you still on SLES 11 SP1? Any needs not to update to either SP2 or the even newer and current SLES 11 SP3?
Beside that - do you really have performance issues or are you trying to tune the system (which
could be a different approach).
A good option you already got is to switch-off the barriers for ext3 for SLES 11 SP1 as they really could slow.down the I/O.
