incredible slow E250

[Peter Keel <debian@discordia.ch>]

Hello

I got my E250 running with my own kernel (2.4.23-rc5-grsec), to be 
correct, I got it crawling for some applications:

time dpkg -l -a 2> /dev/null
real	0m34.671s
user	0m15.090s
sys	0m19.610s

I already can rule out grsecurity. But what could this be?

strace'ing the above shows things like this: 
brk(0)                                  = 0xde000
brk(0)                                  = 0xde000
brk(0xdc000)                            = 0xdc000
brk(0)                                  = 0xdc000
brk(0)                                  = 0xdc000
brk(0xfe000)                            = 0xfe000
brk(0)                                  = 0xfe000
brk(0x120000)                           = 0x120000
brk(0)                                  = 0x120000
brk(0x142000)                           = 0x142000
brk(0)                                  = 0x142000
and so on. Each of those takes about 0.3 seconds. 
Where could this come from? SMP? 

I haven't done anything like profiling before, can anyone give me
some hints on tools and things to profile this?

Thank you
Peter
-- 
Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve 
neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin