Hi-

I installed mandriva 2009 about a month ago on my desktop and it has been working fine - fast, responsive - until about a week ago. It now intermittenly becomes extremely slow and unresponsive while the hard drive light remains constantly lit. I haven't installed any new hardware and the only software I've installed have been the automatic updates... the lsat major one I can remember before it went bad was a load of updates for open office. I've had a look at running processes using KSysGuard and although I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for I can't see anything obviously monstrous going on there. Seems to happen regardless of what programs I'm currently running but doesn't happen all the time.

I've also had a look at the memory in KInfoCenter and again I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for but here is what it says:

Total Memory
Total Memory Free 80%
Used Physical Memory 19%
3.93 GB Free

Physical Memory
Disk Cache 60-70%
Application Data 30%
approx 20 MB Free

Swap Space
Free Swap 99%
3.90 GB Free

It's an AMD Athlon64 processor with a gig of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX 4000 graphics card. Here's the output of lspci although as I've had it working fine for weeks it doesn't feel like it's a hardware problem. Unless my hard drive is just dying.

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8385 [K8T800 AGP] Host Bridge (rev
01)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 Sout
h]
00:09.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 100 22Mbps Wireless Interface
00:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy (rev 03)
00:0b.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy Game Port (rev 03)
00:0b.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Creative Labs SB Audigy FireWire Port
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Control
ler (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/
C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T89 0 South]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTra nsport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Con troller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscella neous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (r ev c1)

Thanks,

Russell

Have you tried running "top" and looking at the CPU and memory usage there?

What is the output of "ps aux" when this problem is happening?

Are there any hard drive seek errors in the output of "dmesg"?

Thanks for replying David but I think I've found out what it is: I've been using KTorrent, and, having turned it off, everything seems to have returned to normal. I guess I need to have a play with the settings to prevent it completely consuming all the system resources.

Russell

/me laughs out loud