Re: Debugging severe performance problems
2005-12-27 11:39 +0100, Kjetil Kjernsmo <kjetil@kjernsmo.net>:
> Hi all!
>
> One of my systems has a really severe performance problem.
>
> [...]
>
> It is my father's system, so I'm not bothered with it too often, but the
> performance is insanely bad. When it does updatedb, the system pretty
> much freezes for the time it takes to scan the disk. Firefox takes more
> than a minute to start, and a regular apt-get upgrade with trivial
> security fixes makes the load go to above 5. My own system is similar
> to this system, but has a somewhat slower CPU, and performs well. It is
> definitely not because it doesn't have the hardware.
>
> So, well, I have a system here that borders on unusable and no idea how
> to fix it. Where would you start if you had a *really* slow system?
Given the three scenarios you give, specially the first and maybe also
the third, disk access is a likely candidate. Check with hdparm
whether the HDD-chipset is using the best transfer mode available
(some DMA mode, given the hardware).
As for sluggishness with X, I also seem to have the problem sometimes,
specially when starting X. I had the impression that some time ago it
was a couple of seconds at most that the screen stayed blank while
loading xdm, but now it seems to be in the slow end of the 5-10 s
range, so it is clear that I can't give any advice on that side of the
issue.
--
Gonzalo HIGUERA DÍAZ <gonhidi@gmail.com>
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