Unusually slow computer
 

I am running Debian 3.01 with KDE 3.1.2, and my computer seems unusually slow, especially when using Konqueror as a file browser. Sometimes it will take a good 45 seconds to read the contents of a directory, despite the fact that ls can do it instantly. It also seems to take a long time to start applications such as mozilla & open office.
I have a 2Ghz athlon, with 1GB of RAM, so I'd expect things to be much faster.
Does anyone know:
a) Why this is
b) If it's fixable
c) If so, how?

Thanks,
Guy

KDE and Konq are not the lightest apps in the world but that is way to slow.

open Konq and select a dir to browse and then open a terminal and and run:

$top

Post the output.

BTW ls will always be faster as there is no gui to render.

type "top" on ur console and check the program garnering highest memory in it's functioning...

then write killall "name of the program" and ur computer will be faster.
but that cannot be the only reason for your computer to be slow..
sometimes, even bad hardware configuration also leads to excessive CPU time usage and hence a slow system... so u have to try various options...

Regards
Xing

well if top shows that the program using up tons of resources is the browser itself simply killing it is not a good enough answer. Post the output and we'll look at it to see if shows up anything.

Thanks. I am at work now, but I'll try it when I get home, and post it tomorrow.

I suspect that the slowness of the computer is not due to the desktop environment. You should try checking the speed of the IDE bus with the program "hdparm" and make sure that your drive is running in UDMA mode (I assume your motherboard and drive both support since it is new).

Also you unfortunately picked two poor "benchmarking" programs (mozilla and openoffice) to measure the speed of your system. Mozilla has always been slow (Firebird is getting much faster), and OpenOffice is inherently slow to start up since it must run a virtual machine. The performance of other programs such as Abiword, the Gimp, or Xine may be a better test. I don't have any experience with Konqueror, but a quick Google shows a possible problem with the Qt version. Maybe that's the deal.

another thing to try if Konqueror is taking ages to start up is this:
start konqueror from an xterm, and see if it seems to hang on any particular thing.

do an "strace" of a running slow process, using "-p PID"

install sysstat

yea, its prolly not using dma and using PIO. get rid of kde and use Gnome, 1.4 just came out!

note: mozilla 1.4 and 1.5 beat the shit out of ie 6 in loading times.

I may have narrowed down the cause of things.
I don't have internet access at home, so I ran top this morning whilst looking in Konqueror. I tried looking in directories which had previously caused problems due to having many files (eg. /usr/bin) and they seemed to read fairly quickly. I ran top, and couldn't see konqueror on there - nothing was using more than 5% of CPU or memory.
Anyway, I copied the output, and created a text file. I then inserted a floppy disk, and went into Konqueror. It was only looking at my home directory, which currently doesn't have a link to the floppy drive, but it started going ridiculously slowly, and as time progressed, it listed additional copies of all of the files in my home directory, like so:
At first it would list:

projects
music
top.txt

And then a little later:

projects
projects
music
music
top.txt
top.txt

and then:

projects
projects
projects
music
music
music
top.txt
top.txt
top.txt

and so on, up to about 5 copies, when it waited for about 20 secs and then went back to normal.
I only properly set up autofs a couple of days ago, and the worst problems have been occurring since then.

Having said that, it was still having some problems previous to this, but only on very large directories which would maybe take 10-15 seconds to read.

My autofs settings are as follows:

auto.master:
/auto/cdrom /etc/auto.cdrom --timeout=10
/auto/cdrw /etc/auto.cdrw --timeout=10
/auto/floppy /etc/auto.floppy --timeout=1

auto.cdrom:
cdrom -fstype=iso9660,ro :/dev/cdrom

auto.cdrw:
cdrw -fstype=iso9660,rw :/dev/hdd

auto.floppy
floppy -fstype=auto,defaults,user,suid :/dev/fd0


and I then used the commands:

ln -s /auto/floppy/floppy /mnt/floppy
ln -s /auto/cdrom/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
ln -s /auto/cdrw/cdrw /mnt/cdrw

I was using a tutorial from:
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue24/nielsen.html
to do this. I didn't use the script there though.

The CD drives seem to be working fine, but the floppy seems to be a cause of these problems (or at least a contributing one).
When I then tried using the console to copy the file top.txt to the floppy (cp top.txt /mnt/floppy) I first didn't have permission, and then when I tried as root, it didn't activate the drive at all, but still listed the file as residing in /mnt/floppy. I could manually umount it, to no effect.

SO...
The upshot is that I don't have the output of top, but instead I have a whole host of other problems. If mozilla and openoffice are slow anyway, that's fine, most things work at a reasonable speed, apart from Konqueror.
If anyone can help with this, I would be most grateful
Guy

P.S Sorry for the massive length of this post

When I first started with linux, everything took at least 10 seconds to open. However, recompiling the kernel made everything work instantaneously. If you haven't recompiled your kernel yet, maybe that's the cause.

see if you have dma turned on by running 'hdparm' as root ie. hdparm /dev/hda

i agree with the dma prob. try the hdparm as hackers_ suggests.

as root, type:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

and post the output here.

note: some systems have the hdparm prog in /sbin so, if you get a command not found, cd into /sbin and type: "./hdparm -tT /dev/hda"

On my system. When my internet connection is down, my system starts getting slower. If I do ifdown eth0. Everything is much faster. I need to fix my system one of these days.

Lite kernel version will help a lot on some systems. You may want to compile it for a 486 so that the kernel is not huge. You will still have support for your processor if you include the optimizations for the software.

The filesystem also has something to do with it. ext3 is limited to how many files you can have in a directory before it decreases your system's performance. reiserfs, xfs and jfs are good alternatives.