Hey all


I'm stumped!! My wife's machine is a dual boot win98 and Slackware 10.2, running XFce 4. The machine keeps running really (and really is literally painful to watch) slow - a sent email takes up to a minute to disappear from the screen for example; the mouse pointer sticks and jumps when dragged; menus take ages to appear; windows are refreshing after an age of something happening; etc.
This originally happened when she was running KDE so that is why I switched her to a low resource hog WM like Xfce. Before that, the system was really slow, but I changed the swap size and this seemed to fix the problem temporarily.
She has 250MB of RAM on board and the swap is 533MB, used physical mem was about 31% and used swap 38%. When looking at top, I see that the load average at its worst time was in the region of 4.4, 3.7 and 2.8 but 94.*% of the CPU(s) was idle!!??
I can't see any logical reason for this: she did have firefox open and kmail open with 2 emails, and konsole, but no multimedia, no resource intensive apps, etc.
What am I looking for to fix this and how would I start?

Any help gratefully received.

Sounds like it might possibly be your hard drive is not set right. Can you check output of hdparm Should look similar to this:- You are looking for using_dma = 1. if not, send back your output



hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 16383/255/63, sectors = 58605120, start = 0

hey vdemuth

Thanks for the quick response.

The output of hdparm /dev/hda is:

Now what? What does this mean, and is this likely to be the source of the problem. It seems to have cleared up now, but for prevention purposes I'd like to get to the bottom of this if I can.

Cheers

I'm wondering if it is something with the graphics then. What about trying another window manager and seeing if the problem persists? I'm wondering if xfce is trying to do some crazy transparency or antialiased fonts that cause the system to slow. I know that any type of graphical magic with only software drivers will cause the CPU to spike severly.

If a new wm still doesn't make a difference, you might have to try tweaking the xorg.conf file, things like color depth, refresh rate, etc.

Also, what are the full specs for the machine? You didn't mention the CPU speed or the video card (if there is one), and more information always helps.

One more thing, what was taking the ~90% CPU in top?

I've run both, KDE and Xfce under worse conditions (128Mb in a k6-2 CPU) and they perform at an acceptable speed (no more than 1 second lag for the windows to dissapear)

I don't think this has anything to do with the amount of RAM. I'd be searching for faulty hardware (HD or RAM, maybe some other stuff?) or maybe a misconfigured (read: totally screwed up) xorg.conf file.