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Re: Disk performance when installing packages



On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 08:16:41PM -0300, Jeronimo Pellegrini wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
>   I was wondering if anyone else notices this when installing or
>   removing packages: the disk is heavily used (like when the cron
>   scripts are triggered in the morning) for some time (depending on
>   the number and size of the packages), and the box becomes absolutely
>   slow. This happens even with small pacakges, in a Woody/Pentium II
>   400 with 64 Mb of RAM and a 15 Gb Western Digital Caviar HD using
>   ATA66... The window manager is flwm (the fastest and lightest I
>   could find)... And I'm also using Gnome, but Gnome is usually pretty
>   fast here. (And I usually have 20 or 30 Mb of free memory.)

First, you don't have scads of RAM for running Gnome -- I tend to avoid
it with a slower box (PII 180) and more RAM (96MB), and don't
particularly care for it at work (PIII-450/128).

Debian reads the entire package list when installing files.  It's also
updating a bunch of stuff.  This is pretty disk intensive.  It's also
possible that you're swapping a lot of data, particularly if you're
trying to use any apps under Gnome while doing the installation.  Above
all that, IDE performance tends to suck a whole lot more CPU juice than
SCSI does (I run SCSI on two of three disks).  You might want to launch
a couple of system monitoring tools.  My preferences are wmmon and asmon 
under WindowMaker, though top will give some raw measures.  Not sure
what you can turn to for disk I/O and realtime swap usage.  Anyone?
Hmmm... xosview is butt ugly but damned useful, it might be helpful
also.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Opensales, Inc.                    http://www.opensales.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?   Debian GNU/Linux rocks!
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/    K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org
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