I recently upgraded workstations and the new machine is a hyper-threaded P4 3.2 GHz processor, 3 GB ram, 250 GB sata hard drive with EM64T support. One thing I am finding is that it is very choppy in performance. Even typing, I notice a slight delay. Running some apps take 2x as long to load. And this delay happens upon login (to KDE).

I have checked RAM and CPU settings, and both are within acceptable ranges (cpu load average: 0.03, 0.15, 0.27).

Is this phenomonon something that the rest of you have noticed? If so, what can I do to improve performance?

My distro is OpenSUSE 10.1, and I'm having trouble patching it (neither YaST Online Update nor zen-updater will run).

Ideas?

Hi tisource,

I've had the same problem, and I suspect (no formal proof, here...) that it comes from the sata drive. When trying to install 10.1 x86_64 normally, I get an error message saying "No hard drive found". I managed to install it with failsafe settings, but then the gets sluggish as hell.
Another possibility is that Beagle is doing some indexing in the background, but I guess that would show on your system's load.
As to the problem when patching SuSE, look for "SMART" in this forum, you will find plenty of interesting things...

Willy