I have a MySQL Server that should be performing better than it seems to be. We're running ubuntu on a Amazon Cluster Compute (cc1.4xlarge)

Linux ip-10-0-1-60 3.2.0-25-virtual #40-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 23 22:20:17 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Release:    12.04
Codename:   precise

I have several output files from sar that i'm not really sure how to interpret. For example, I ran:

# Individual block device I/O activities
sar -d 1 180 > logs/block_device_io.log &

which gave me what looks like really high utilisation of my disk (turns out this block device maps to

/dev/xvdh on /var/lib/mysql type ext4 (rw,_netdev)

The output from my log:

10:48:59 PM       DEV       tps  rd_sec/s  wr_sec/s  avgrq-sz  avgqu-sz     await       svctm     %util
10:49:00 PM dev202-16      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
10:49:00 PM dev202-32      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
10:49:00 PM    dev8-0      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00
10:49:00 PM dev202-112   1008.00  31040.00   1416.00     32.20      1.02      1.01      0.89     90.00
10:49:00 PM dev202-80      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00

Am I wrong in thinking this is a problem? I have it above 90% almost the entire time we're seeing slowness. Or does this just mean MySQL is doing what it's supposed to do?