Hi, I've been running slackware for a VERY long time back from 3.5 days. I have a amd k6-2 500 with 94 mb ram, I also have a u1 intel p4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb ram Almost everything is the same on these servers slackware 8.1. However cpu wise the 500 mhz is blowing this 1.8 ghz system away. the 1.8 ghz takes 5 times as long as the 500 mhz does to compile the kernel, or any other application. I'm not running X or anything like that. The following is from dmesg on the 1.8 ghz machine.. Thank You

Linux version 2.4.20 (root@AcmeShells) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #
2 Mon Mar 10 17:34:30 CST 2003
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000e0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000001ffc0000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000001ffc0000 - 000000001fff8000 (ACPI data)
BIOS-e820: 000000001fff8000 - 0000000020000000 (ACPI NVS)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 00000000fec01000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fee00000 - 00000000fee01000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000ffb80000 - 00000000ffc00000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fff00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
511MB LOWMEM available.
On node 0 totalpages: 131008
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone(1): 126912 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root=303
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 1794.236 MHz processor.
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 3578.26 BogoMIPS
Memory: 515896k/524032k available (1236k kernel code, 7748k reserved, 550k data,
92k init, 0k highmem)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
Mount-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Buffer-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
CPU: L1 I cache: 0K, L1 D cache: 8K
CPU: L2 cache: 512K
Intel machine check architecture supported.
Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
CPU: After generic, caps: 3febfbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
CPU: Common caps: 3febfbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz stepping 04
Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfda95, last bus=2

PCI: Using configuration type 1
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
Transparent bridge - Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA/DB PCI Bridge
PCI: Using IRQ router PIIX [8086/2440] at 00:1f.0
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: No Plug & Play device found
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.4.0 initialized
Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI IS
APNP enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ICH2: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev f9
ICH2: chipset revision 5
ICH2: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdcMA, hddio
keyboard: Timeout - AT keyboard not present?(ed)
keyboard: Timeout - AT keyboard not present?(f4)
hda: ST360015A, ATA DISK drive
hdc: CD-956E/AKV, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
blk: queue c02fe964, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hda: 117231408 sectors (60022 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=7297/255/63, UDMA(100)
hdc: ATAPI 52X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 >
eepro100.c:v1.09j-t 9/29/99 Donald Becker http://www.scyld.com/network/eepro100.
html
eepro100.c: $Revision: 1.36 $ 2000/11/17 Modified by Andrey V. Savochkin <saw@sa
w.sw.com.sg> and others
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 02:0c.0
eth0: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100], 00:AA:00:30:96:1B, IRQ 11.
Board assembly ffffff-255, Physical connectors present: RJ45
Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
General self-test: passed.
Serial sub-system self-test: passed.
Internal registers self-test: passed.
ROM checksum self-test: passed (0xb874c1d3).
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 02:0d.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.2
eth1: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (#2), 00:AA:00:30:96:1C, IRQ 11.
Board assembly ffffff-255, Physical connectors present: RJ45
Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
General self-test: passed.
Serial sub-system self-test: passed.
Internal registers self-test: passed.
ROM checksum self-test: passed (0xb874c1d3).
Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 439M
agpgart: Detected Intel i845 chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xf8000000
[drm] Initialized tdfx 1.0.0 20010216 on minor 0
[drm] AGP 0.99 on Intel i845 @ 0xf8000000 64MB
[drm] Initialized radeon 1.1.1 20010405 on minor 1
[drm] AGP 0.99 on Intel i845 @ 0xf8000000 64MB
[drm] Initialized i810 1.2.0 20010920 on minor 2
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno = 2
Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
options: [pci] [cardbus]
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
IP: routing cache hash table of 4096 buckets, 32Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 32768 bind 32768)
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
ds: no socket drivers loaded!
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 92k freed
Adding Swap: 979956k swap-space (priority -1)

you can try closing the services that you are not using this will save some resource and try taking out things from the kernel that you dont need

Since kernel compile is a rather IO-intense
thing I'd like to see your
Next thing: Newer Intel IDE Chipsets (845, I believe)
have some problems with kernels < 2.4.20, a colleague
here at work couldn't get more than 1.5MB/s out of
a PIV 2.4 GHz running Mandrake 9.0 ...

Worked fine with a stock 2.4.20 kernel... 50Mb/s now ;)

Cheers,
Tink

/dev/hda:
using_dma /dev/hda: = 1(on)


Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 3.28 seconds = 39.02 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.54 seconds = 18.08 MB/sec

Already optimized..



/dev/hda:

Model=ST360015A, FwRev=3.30, SerialNo=3KC04C4Y
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=117231408
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2: 1 2 3 4 5 6

i assume ddr sdram?

Yeap... I'm going crazy here.. is there some kind of bug in the 2.4.* kernel? runs this slow on 2.4.18 also

you tried any from the 2.5 series to see if its already been fixed?

No, not yet.. i'm going to try 2.5.59 i've seen a couple things related to p4 in there