I recently installed Suse 9.1 (was running Redhat 9) to get all the latest and greatest kernel 2.6 / usb hotplug support.

This is on a dual Celeron 533 with 640Mb ram, 30gig hard drive.

Now, the system is so slow, it's pretty much unusable. It's not just GUI apps that are slow, if I try to do something like 'su', it will take up to 5-10 seconds for the shell prompt to appear after I type in the password.

Same thing goes for loading an app like xmms from the console.

Nothing jumps out at me, I watch the processes with top while I try loading xmms and there's nothing there, it's at 99% idle most of the time, and the memory usage is about 200Mb.

The hard drive is accessed occasionally, but it's not grinding away trying to load something.

BTW once programs are loaded, they mostly work ok, ie I can have 2 bittorrent downloads in the background going at 75kb/s each and it doesn't seem to affect performance at all. Mozilla however, it pathetically slow now.

It's frustrating because I had pretty much the same setup as before on my Redhat box, but I'd upgraded it by hand to kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2 etc so it wasn't as nice as the Suse 9.1 distro I've used at work.

Any tips on how to track it down with strace, etc?

I can think of two issues into which you may look. First, make sure you have the smp kernel running. Secondly, make sure you have properly set up your swap partition.

Check the kernel with >uname -r.

You can use #fdisk /dev/hda and then p to look at your partitions.

Next, q to leave fdisk.

Your swap partition should be as large as your RAM memory.

The 2.6 kernel is noticeably faster than the 2.4 kernel you used with RH 9.

Also, you should be using RieserFS as you file system.

If you used the existing RH 9 partition set up you'll have ext. 3 as your file system.

Any of this sound like it's in the ball park?

tadelste, thanks for your reply.

My kernel is 2.6.5-7.108-smp. Damn, I thought you were on to something, I hadn't checked that.

I only have 256M set up for swap, but I wanted it that way. I hardly touched swap when I was running redhat.

Here's the output from free:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 645128 634324 10804 0 45076 362604
-/+ buffers/cache: 226644 418484
Swap: 262544 36 262508


My root drive is set up as ReiserFS, I had created a new one for Suse:

/dev/hdg2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1

I can't offer much help, just sympathy.

I have been using SUSE 9.1 64bit version on an Athlon64 based notebook and it runs slow despite everything I've tried. Compared to my old notebook (600MHz PIII/256MB RAM/40GB HD with Fedora Core 1) it's lethargic.

I'm hoping that the coming SUSE 9.2 will fix whatever is causing things to be slow. I have 2 machines with SUSE 9.0 at work (900MHz Celeron/512MB RAM/20GB HD) and they run fine so maybe it's just the 9.1 version.

Terry

Hey terryl, i've also installed suse 9.1 pro 64 bit on my emachines m6809 laptop. wondering what laptop you're using for your 64 bit suse? anyway, it was all working fine until i updated suse using YOU. Now, whenever I try to boot into linux it gets to the message: Reiser fs: hda3: checking transaction log(hda3) and is stuck at that for ages (i waited 30 min once, and it was still stuck). Any ideas what the problem may be? Should i leave it for an entire night to check if it goes past that? Its not stuck at that point - ie no freeze or anything, but it doesnt go past it. btw, hda3 is where my linux is installed.

Zulu, I have an Acer Aspire 1502 (I think the model has been replaced by a new model).

As for your problem, personally I think I would let it run overnight, just in case but I'd ask around on here and anywhere else (did you buy the SUSE package? are you entitled to some support?). I'd also be getting used to the idea that I may have to re-install.

Sorry, no big help, but good luck.

Hmm... I found some talk that disabling swap with 'sudo swapoff -a' may help.

I haven't been able to use my computer locally, but logging in remotely seems to be quicker. We'll see how it goes when I get home.

I had SuSe 9.1 personal on my HD every thing was working fine then switched to Fedora 2 cuase my friend was like "h it has so much more ect ect" and I dident like it cuase it would die when it tried updating so I reinstalled SuSe 9.1 personal and it LAGS bad. It use to boot 3x faster then windows but now it takes about 5-6 mins to boot....i think I need to LowLevel Format the HD cuase after installing Fedora2 the Drive has been acting funny.

any updates on SuSE and memory problems?

Turning off swap worked for me.

Been having the same problems with SUSE 9.1 which i paid for.
Just tried the sudo swapoff -a
and its given me instant results. Do I have to do this each time I run SUSE?

Thanks

ice.

If you look in /etc/fstab, you'll probably see a swap entry (I can't show you what it looks like because I deleted that line in my file. )

Anyway, if you take that line out, you won't use swap when you reboot.