General jerkiness/pausing of system..

[wells oliver <wells@submute.net>]

I just installed Debian 3.0 on my AMD Athlon 1ghz system and am having
some weird issues. I'm using the 2.4.18-k7 kernel from the packages.

The system will pause occaisionally; it seems jerky. Just for a few
seconds here, 10 seconds there, but it's thoroughly irritating and
baffling.

I had shadow RAM turned on during install, but it's off now.

My inital thoughts, i.e. random stabs in the dark, are that it's
something to do with HD access. I have an 80GB Seagate disc partitioned
into 3, hda1 is /, hda2 is /home, and hda3 is /www. The fstab reads
like:

/dev/hda1   /    		ext2    errors=remount-ro   0   1
/dev/hda2   /www        ext2    errors=remount-ro   0   1
/dev/hda3   /home       ext2    errors=remount-ro   0   1
/dev/hda4   none        swap    sw          0   0

I have also have the folliwning kernel modules loaded and I am entirely
unsure what they do:

rtc                     5592   0  (autoclean)
ext2                   30848   3  (autoclean)
ide-disk                6816   4  (autoclean)
ide-probe-mod           8096   0  (autoclean)
ide-mod               131404   4  (autoclean) [ide-disk ide-probe-mod]
ext3                   57248   0  (autoclean)
jbd                    35640   0  (autoclean) [ext3]
unix                   13636   8  (autoclean)

I realize this is a vague problem and that is partly why it's so
baffling to me and frustrating. Any advice appreciated!

/ wells oliver // wells@submute.net
/ http://www.submute.net