My system has a problem.

Every now and then it suddenly just grinds to a halt. Even the mouse pointer goes juddery, switching windows is a painful experience.

I've watched the process list, and it's cron that's doing the damage, which would be understandable... except that I've got no crontabs set up at all. I can't find anything that should be running, let alone slowing me down so badly. And the machine is almost brand new too - AMD2600 and 1gig memory - I wouldn't expect speed problems like I'm seeing, even with a busy crontab.

The cron process is running various programs, but the ones that seem to be slowing me down are sed and find in particular. (I don't know what it's trying to find though)

Can anyone help point me in the right direction to find out what's happening? What should I be looking at? Thanks

I'm running SuSE 9.0, by the way.

Have a look in
/etc/cron.hourly
/etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.weekly
/etc/cron.monthly

If you can't find anything containing find and or sed
in these directories, have a look at /var/spool/cron/crontabs/

If find makes the system behave that badly you've probably
got DMA disabled. Type
hdparm /dev/hda


Cheers,
Tink

Thank you for the reply Tinkster. Very helpful

The file in cron.daily that's doing it is 'updatedb'.

But more importantly, I think you may be on the right track with that comment about the DMA. hdparm tells me that it's off, so you may well have got something there.

So the next question is how do I turn it on... and also *should* I turn it on? Are there any reasons why I shouldn't? And if not, why wasn't it already switched on (I certainly haven't turned anything off - it should be set the way Suse installed it)

Anyway, thanks for the help.

To turn it on, try
hdpram -d 1 /dev/hda


It shouldn't be a problem with the supposedly very recent
hardware you're using, no idea why SuSE's installer would
have chosen NOT to enable it.


Cheers,
Tink

Okay.

hdparm turned it on just fine, but it was back off again after a reboot.

So I tried turning it on using YaST (which is where SuSE likes us to do things), and the computer locked up.

Hmm... either that or perhaps I didn't leave it long enough to think about it?

Sorry mate, no idea what SuSE does ... haven't used it
since 7, I'm a Slacker now ;)
If all else fails edit your `locate rc\.local` and put it in
manually.


Cheers,
Tink

Hi,

I also use suse, but 10.2.
In Yast2, go to Hardware-IDE DMA Mode-DMA On (default).
Works without rebooting.

My computer needed 5-10 min's, then it was ok. If no, reboot.