I'm baffled by this:

My RH 9 PC had been operating flawlessly for at least a couple weeks.

Today, I took 2 actions with the PC. 1.) Ran the RH update, which installed an update to <<gnupg>>. 2.) Ran <<neat>> and changed the hostname from localhost.localdomain to sab.localdomain, using the GUI.

Suddenly, the PC is lagging, opening applications stunningly slow, loading web pages slow. Before today, applications opened instantly, web pages snapped up, etc.

Is it the update to <<gnupg>>? Is there anyway to roll it back? rpm -e told me there was a failed dependency in up2date.

I'm lost.

my guess would be that you're having a
name lookup problem with your new hostname ...
I don't know what/how neat does, but try
changing it back with the same tool ;)

Or look at /etc/hosts ... have you still
got a localhost-entry?

Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the reply, Tink.

Wow! I think that might be it. I just switched the hostname back (before I saw your reply), rebooted and everything sped back up, except for some lag in web browsing--which wasn't as severe initially and could have another benign cause.

Thus, I effectively did what you suggested I do. Now, for learning's sake, is there a way to switch the hostname without producing the problem I caused?

Unfortunately such things are distro specific ... it's
been a while since I last touched RH, so I'd suggest
to wait for a RH user to crawl along ;)

In Slack, there's a file /etc/HOSTNAME being
evaluated & set by /etc/rc.d/rc.M (using
/bin/hostname) without modifying the /etc/hosts
file ....


You could grep your /etc/ for hostname
grep -ir hostname /etc/* ...


Cheers,
Tink