I'm having a bit of trouble with my laptop running Slackware. Whenever I am doing something realtivly intensive, the system just slows to a crawl. This includes when I am compiling a package, but even for simple things such as untarring a large package. I'm running a 3.0Ghz P4 processor with Hyperthreading - I really shouldn't be able to make this thing crawl so easily...
What could be causing this performance drain?
I did have to roll my own kernel with the cutting-edge mm patch in order to get my sound working - did I maybe not flip some switch in the kernel config that might be affecting my performance this much? I am leaning away from the 5400rpm drive being the major problem - even my mouse slows down in X when this occurs and the mouse cursor changing wouldn't be trying to access the hard drive. When I compile something, cc1 takes up about 25% of my cpu and most of my ram, but I never even touch my swap the whole time.
System info:
cat /usr/src/linux/.config
cat /proc/cpuinfo
hdparm -I /dev/hda
If anything else is needed just ask!