System hangs on occasion, especially downloading stuff

TravisOSF · 04-01-2004, 03:58 PM

Hey, I have a decently fast system (Athlon XP 2700+ with 512 Mb RAM) yet at odd times (namely when opening Mozilla and especially when downloading large files at fast rates) my system will continuously hang for about 2 seconds then work fine, then hang for two seconds.

What could be causing this...I have two hard disks and I forget which directory I mounted my secondary disk to...it wasn't just an extended drive...is there any way to tell and did I do something stupid that way?

Thanks for helping a n00b!

fluppi · 04-02-2004, 08:25 AM

First, is your networkcard onboard ?
I had this problem too, after a few days, I bought a supported PCI networkcard :-(
There is still hardware that not work with linux...

Second, type "mount" it shows you what device is where attached.

TravisOSF · 04-02-2004, 10:36 AM

Yeah, it's a onboard NIC. But this may be my problem, I have my second hard disk (which is slower) attached to my /var/ directory. So that means that all myinternet cache and such is going there first, then to the destination and it's making two harddisks work at the same time rather than one....

How would I change the /var/ to my primary and how can i still use my second disk effectively?

TravisOSF · 04-03-2004, 02:16 PM

*bump*

kundor · 04-03-2004, 04:00 PM

If it's not being used continuously, and you have bios set to put drives to sleep, it's possible that your second drive is going to sleep, then being reawakened. Activating drives causes about a 2 second wait in my experience.

TravisOSF · 04-03-2004, 04:13 PM

it's not a need to wake the drive, or at least i doubt it. it does it continuously as things download...like, every ten seconds it will hang for a minute if it's a large file at a high speed (over 500kb/s)