David Purton wrote: > Everything takes forever to load (including booting), but then runs ok > once loaded. Could DMA be disabled now? Taking a long time to read initially but running okay afterward would match that symptom. Because after the initial read it should be in filesystem buffer cache. > My only guess is that it is filesystem related, but I am not sure how to > confirm this, nor why things would have got to the present situation. > > Currently, the root/system parition is 20GB, with 50% used. /home has > only 44% used. That seems like a good amount of free space available for the filesystem to deal with disk fragmentation. > Any suggestions? Since other suggested possible hard drive problems... What does smartctl say about the health of your drive? smartctl -H /dev/sda Any selftest failures? Are you running smartctl selftests? If not then please do. I always run selftests regularly to get feedback about the drives. Let me suggest something similar to this in /etc/smartd.conf so as to have these run automatically. # Monitor all attributes, enable automatic online data collection, # automatic Attribute autosave, and start a short self-test every day # between 2-3am, and a long self test Saturdays between 3-4am. # On failure run all installed scripts (to send notification email). # Ignore attribute 194 temperature change. # Ignore attribute 190 airflow temperature change. /dev/sda -a -o on -S on -s (S/../../[1-5]/03|L/../../6/03) -I 194 -I 190 -m root -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner This will dump the selftests. Any failures? smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda If you need to manually run selftests: smartctl -t short /dev/sda If short passes pick a time and run: smartctl -t long /dev/sda You might try using 'hdparm' to produce some data for your disk. Read the hdparm documentation first (lots of docs on the web such as this) http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Hdparm#Benchmarking_devices and then you might try this on an otherwise idle system. # hdparm -tT /dev/sda Timing cached reads: 4634 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2320.31 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 378 MB in 3.01 seconds = 125.71 MB/sec Lastly you could benchmark the filesystem (a layer on top of the disk system) using bonnie/bonnie++. > Both are ext3 Directly on the disk partition (e.g. /dev/sda5)? Or on top of LVM? Or on top of RAID (e.g. /dev/md1)? Or LVM on RAID? > I do not want to reinstall if at all possible. I am always an advocate of upgrades not re-installs. :-) Bob
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