[plug] FC3 running slowly with a lot of HDD activity

[Daniel Foote]

Hello there...

Just to add my little bit...

Back in the day, when I was running Red Hat 7.1 (before I found the
light of Debian) I also ran into something that sounds a little bit
similar.

It turns out that the computer would slow down about 20-30 minutes
after bootup, and the hard disk would bash like crazy for a good 15
minutes. Very annoying when you were trying to watch movies on the
machine...

The issue in this case was anacron, which by default runs a locate
database update sometime after boot. Anacron was starting it because
cron missed it (scheduled for midnight).

Not sure if later RedHats/Fedoras still do this. I ended up disabling
it (I don't use locate myself). I suppose you could just make cron do
it at midnight if the machine was up, rather than let anacron pick it
up later. But that's up to you...

Of course, this might not be your issue. When it's busy, just use top
to see what's doing all the work. That's how I caught it on my box.

Daniel.

On 12/11/05, Ari Finander <outrider at operamail.com> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jim Householder" <nofixed at westnet.com.au>
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] FC3 running slowly with a lot of HDD activity
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 20:27:30 +0800
>
> >
> > Ari Finander wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I've been having problems recently with my FC3 system (fully
> > > updated). Programs start very slowly compared to a month ago, and
> > > there's a lot more hard disk drive activity than before during
> > > the lag. The hard drive with the OS and swap has 29.9GB free
> > > space (it's a 40GB drive). There's 512mb of memory. The software
> > > RAID 1 drives are almost full (only about 10% left of 200GB), but
> > > only the mozilla user directories are stored on (and thus
> > > accessed from) that drive, and there is 20GB of free space left
> > > there. Where should I start with trouble shooting this? In
> > > windows I'd be running a defrag. The file systems are  extension
> > > 3.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Ari
> > >
> > Check /var/log/dmesg, first 20 lines or so, to find how much RAM
> > the system is detecting.  Sounds like you may have a thrashing
> > problem, where not all the RAM is detected/used, and the swap file
> > is getting excessive use.
> >
> > Jim
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> Here's what dmesg shows:
>
> Memory: 483004k/491456k available (2045k kernel code, 7924k reserved, 655k data, 160k init, 0k highmem)
>
> So, when you take away the 32mb reserved for the onboard video, it makes up the rest of the 512mb I have in there. It's detecting it all.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ari
>
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