On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 12:12:46PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: > On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 11:35:05AM +1000, Brian May wrote: > > Also, if a computer is running slowly, but top says the CPU has plenty > > of idle time and free RAM, is there anyway I can find out what is > > wrong? > > most likely slow disks. Your system is supposed to multitask regardless if your disks are slow or not. Unfortunatelly the default settings are quite conservative and give very bad performance via older disks. Try reading man hdparm. The most useful setting is enabling DMA (which needs additional kernel support for your chipset), there is also the unmask irq setting which lets your machine (somehow) process other interrupts while waiting for disk IO, and the 32-bit access. This however can lead to data corruption on crappy hardware, so test thoughtly before making the change long-term.. Thanks, Norbert
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