Re: about the debian way
On Sun, Mar 17, 2002 at 12:11:08PM -0500, christophe barbé wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2002 at 02:44:20PM +0100, Matijs van Zuijlen wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 08:57:40PM -0500, christophe barbé wrote:
> > > On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 07:07:19PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 03:22:04PM -0500, christophe barb? wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I use an old laptop with a not so good ide drive.
> > > > > Each time a soft uses too much the drive, the feeling (responsiveness)
> > > > > of the system is degraded.
> > > > > It not so bad but for some particular cases it's very bad.
> > > > >
> > > > > One of this case is 'find /'
> > > >
> > > > You may want to try:
> > > >
> > > > apt-get install hdparm
> > > >
> > > > and experiment with the settings. This tuning will often considerably
> > > > increase laptop disk performance and system responsiveness.
> > >
> > > Thanks.
> > > I already played with hdparm and I believe I can't do better now.
> > > The major problem is that the swap is used and when find / is running
> > > you really know that the kernel is using the swap. I could add RAM
> > > (which is expensive) or buy a new laptop (which ...) but most of the
> > > time I am more than happy with it.
> > >
> > > I am astonished that no one else reported this problem. A 'find /' is
> > > not a small task and with anacron you noticed it automatically when you
> > > power on your machine (you power it on to use it and boom steve is
> > > working too). Perhaps most laptop user don't use anacron and then miss
> > > most of the cron task.
> >
> > My laptop is basically always on, so usually cron handles all that while
> > I'm sleeping. It needs to be on, since it is a cvs server, and I just
> > can't be bothered to wait for it to boot. Whenever anacron does start, I
> > have no real problems with performance though. How much RAM do you have?
>
> You don't really use it like a laptop.
True.
> I particularly appreciate the suspend mode, with it it is very fast to
> power on and off the machine (a few secs).
Yes, that would be nice. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on my laptop.
Apparantly, I could get it to work if I update the BIOS, but I'm not
really comfortable doing that.
> You really can run a 'find /' without noticing it in other apps ?
Well, I just tried. It's not perfect, but it's not really bad either. I
can see how it could be irritationg if it happens when you just want to
get started quickly after a resume.
> My computer is a amd K6-2 300MHz with 96MB. It is not so bad execpt for
> the harddrive.
I have a 366 Celeran, with 96MB also. Could be the harddrive, indeed.
You may want to try and set a longer delay before anacron kicks in. I
think you can set that in /etc/anacrontab.
--
Matijs
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