yeah, thought that too... well, as i said last post, if i keep turning it off and on again, the priority gets lower. begins with -1 and goes to -2, -3... and so on.

suspecting I had a swap problem, i wrote a small program to fill my memory, and for the first time since slack12, it used the swap, loool!! but in normal days, it's never used. even if i echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/swapness... I have 768MB of physical memory

What does happen if you raise the priority of swap?
Why does the tracker deamon with the lowest niceness take the whole cpu?

if i raise the priority to 32767, it won't swap either. I believe it's so because I have a fair amount of RAM, 768MB. I wrote a small program that fills up memory until system crash (). when I run it,then swap's used. so I don't think it's a swap problem.
trackerd was getting all the processor because it was the only process doing something when i started looking at the problem...

I would try to recompile the kernel and select different scheduler.

You can change scheduler without recompiling the kernel. Give it as a boot parameter.

However, IMO this won't fix anything. Something is not configured properly on the system. Can't tell what tho, it's probably many things.

I don't think it's a scheduler problem anymore. I believe it's something related to the kernel that's messing with some other kernel code. I got once some APIC errors on my CPU, what made me google a bit, and I found that it seems SIS chipsets have a problem with linux. I'll take a look more carefully at this. I'll also try to compile an older kernel, because at times I used 2.6.14 I didn't have this problem. or at least didn't notice it.
as I said before, I'd like to believe it was some kernel misconfiguration I did, but even the generic-smp kernel had this problem.

as soon as I have news on it, i'll post. but if any of you guys have more suggestions, please let us know!
thks and best regards

If it's an apic problem then disable it. Pass 'noapic' and possible also 'noioapic', 'nolapic' as boot parameters to the kernel. You can also compile the kernel without it.

why would you ever build a 2.6.14 kernel for slack 12 the system is desinged to run the 2.6.21.5-smp kernel and the none smp that comes with it dont use it is is not very good. ok the smp is fast for my slow machine the only reason you will have bad or slow speed is because of your video card what kind do you have if linux did not load the right one and it is running a generic driver it is pushing it through the cpu and this will make your system slooooooooooowwwwww. do a xorgsetup and try to fix the problem hope this helped. Pat wrote the whole system around the 2.6.21.5-smp kernel and scripts.

@Drakeo
I thought alissonbn said it was slow even without X started...


I do agree that you should not bother trying to use a kernel older than the one that comes with Slackware.

Also, I have SiS chipsets and I don't have these problems.

well, I'd like to build this kernel because i didn't have this kind of problem(at least I didn't notice) running this kernel.
as for my video card, i'm not using any generic driver for it. i'm using the radeon driver for my ATI RADEON 9250, what gives me fair 906.565 FPS in glxgears
also, lowering the kernel shouldn't mess a lot with slackware, since the kernel interface doesn't change that fast. most programs won't complain. maybe HAL and DBUS will, but I can also just disable them. I just want to track the problem. I tried to run the generic and the generic-smp kernels that ship with slackware, but it also had problems.

well, i had tried some of theses options, but not yet the noioapic and nolapic. unfortunately, it didn't worked either.
i'm running out of possibilities:P
I believe my last try will be recompiling an older kernel. if it works, i'd use it just for heavy duty operations, like compilating huge code or gaming.
for daily use, the 2.6.24 kernel handles quite good.
I will also try a live cd distro and try to do some heavy load there and see what happens. i won't give up slackware yet, but I just want to know if it's a kernel issue or slackware issue.

To my knowledge you CANNOT use a kernel < 2.6.18 with Slackware 12.0 (I may be wrong, but I think that's the one). Compiling an old kernel is totally moronic and will solve nothing -- if anything is different, it's the CONFIGURATION of the new kernel that's the problem, not the new kernel itself (unless something REALLY screwy is going on, in which case I would recommend going back to Slackware 11.0 and upgrading the kernel that worked before -- but this would be a last resort).

How much time have you invested in setting up the system (ie can you do a reinstall of the OS without losing massive amounts of time and information [assuming you don't back things up])? It sounds like something has been fudged up along the way -- it's hard to tell if it's strictly a kernel issue or if it's something else. One suggestion I would have is to try booting up with a LiveCD running a modern kernel (>=2.6.21.5) and see if it works properly (taking into account the fact that a LiveCD will be slower than running from a hard drive). If it runs faster, it's a setup problem and not the kernel itself (although the kernel configuration could also be messed up).

Here's a question: If you boot from the Slackware install cd do you notice any slowdowns (did you notice them during the install?)?

You said you tried the generic kernels, but did you also try the huge kernels (I figure you did, but I don't know for sure)?

Perhaps the HAL/DBUS is giving you problems...

Definitely try out some liveCDs to see if you have the same problem.

I have a question. When you boot, does it happen to say something about a "BIOS Bug" ? I remember that a very similar thing happened with my laptop and FC5. All kernels before a certain version worked fine, but after that version, they said 'BIOS Bug' and then some number and stuff. And then weird stuff happened randomly, like the internet would stop working, and sometimes the system would be laggy, and the system would not boot. I've never actually found out why this happened, I changed to Slackware and it worked fine. The 'noapic' 'noioapic' and 'nolapic' were a temporary solution.

guys, i'll be off for some days, i'll be traveling and where i'll go doesn't have inet.
when i get back in 3 days, i'll try what you guys said and post what i got.
thks for all the help and kindness.