Holly Bostick wrote:
Hey, all,
Sorry that this will not be an extremely clear question, but I really
have no idea where to start, or what the problem is.
Basically, my system is running "fine" (no overt problems), but about
every 30 seconds or so, it 'pauses' to do something, and I have to wait
for 5-10 seconds while it does it before I can go further. Or the
display pauses, and I have to wait for the redraw , I can't tell which.
The only time I have similar state with my system is when VMware (which
runs at niceness -10 (!!)) writes out a suspended session
file...basically a high priority process writing a massive amount of
data to a relatively slow device.
So a couple of things come to mind....
1. Check your dmesg and /var/log/messages files and make sure your disk
controller isn't going through resets. Disk controller resets will clog
up the whole system, IME.
2. Similarly, run "smartctl -a" and check if you are getting fresh
errors reported by the hard drive.
3. Try fiddling with process priorities.
Memory and CPU use are not bizarre, I have a lot of processes going, but
nothing weird or unexpected seems to be running if I can trust top and
gnome-system-monitor. Since all the problems seem to be related to the X
server, maybe it's an X problem; I'm currently using the VESA driver, as
I wanted to get a clean install of the new ATI drivers when I compile
Ugh, the VESA driver is horribly slow, IME. You would be much better
off using the radeon driver I think.
FYI, I just tried ati-drivers-8.18.8 with kernel 2.6.14, and it builds
fine. I haven't tried using it yet though. You need to accept ~x86 to
get 8.18.8.
-Richard
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