[plug] Ubuntu woes

[Steve Baker]

Nothing out of the ordinary in the kern.log, messages, syslog, 
daemon.log, or the usual suspects in /var/log.

All disks are in a hardware RAID - 8-port adaptec SATA-II raid card, 2 
discs in RAID-1 and 6 in RAID-5.  The two RAID-1 drives are 12 months or 
so old, the other 6 are all new.  My next plan is to find the afatools 
kit from Adaptec and run the afacli command to check the SMART status of 
the discs and then scrub (check) the arrays.

What is confusing is some tasks are quite quick and others really slow.  
Unpacking a tgz archive was quick,  aptitude safe-upgrade takes a long 
time to do steps like read state information, build the tag database, 
etc. but the download was quick, then it took even longer to do the 
post-installation steps.

Any other insights would be welcome.

Regards,
Steve


Paul Antoine wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> Are there any messages being generated in the kernel or syslog's? Are 
> all the disks in a hardware RAID array?
>
> I have been working on an 8TB server for a client and have experienced 
> a similar issue though in my case some of the (brand new!) disks were 
> generating i/o errors.
>
> In any case I'd be happy to help if I can.
>
> Paul
>
> Steve Baker wrote:
>> Hi Plug,
>>
>> I have a weird problem, I'm hoping someone can help.
>>
>> I have a PC with 4GB RAM and a quad core CPU, with Intel 945 graphics 
>> and lots of discs on an Adaptec SATA RAID card.  I also have a Dell 
>> Latitude D820 laptop with 4GB and dual core CPU and nvidia graphics 
>> chipset.
>>
>> Both systems run Ubuntu 8.04.  The laptop is perfectly fine - runs 
>> everything really well, fast, full compiz effects, etc. etc.  The PC 
>> is crap.  It's very very slow to boot, running aptitude safe-upgrade 
>> can take yonks, particularly if there is a kernel update and it has 
>> to run update-initrd.
>> Disk i/o *seems* to be OK; I un-tarred a tgz file approx 300Mb and it 
>> unpacked quite quickly.  Network throughput seems to be normal.  I 
>> haven't run any CPU benchmarks, don't know what would give me any 
>> useful results.
>>
>> When I log in, it can take 30secs or more after accepting the 
>> password before I get the $ prompt.  (This is NOT the well-known ssh 
>> reverse lookup timeout problem).  Sometimes when running a command 
>> (especially with a larger on-disk program size, eg. vi) it takes a 
>> few seconds to load the program, more than I would expect.
>>
>> Those are the main symptoms, if anyone has any clues I can send 
>> relevant config info upon request.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Steve
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