On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 09:39:30 -0800, Justin Patrin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I originally installed Gentoo on my server box a very long time ago > (3-4 years I think) and it's still running strong. However, I'm > noticing *big* lags when doing anything HD related. Even starting up > simple programs takes some waiting while the HD is accessed. During > large operations (say another box rsyncing to this one) it's much much > slower thanit should be. I've checked top and my CPU is 90+% waiting > for IO. This is certainly not right. There is plenty of unused RAM, no > active swapping is being done AFAIK. > > I formatted my main partition with ReiserFS 3.6. It's worked fine up > until now (and my new Gentoo box seems wiht with ReiserFS). This feels > like a disk fragmentation issue, although I have no way to back that > up. > > Does anyone have any tips for me?
It sounds like you do not have DMA enabled for this drive. I'm hesitant to give instructions as enabling DMA on some older machines is documented by kernel folks as potentially a bad thing. (Causes corruption, etc.) That said you can look at the status using hdparm /dev/hda (change as needed) and you can check speed using hdparm -tT /dev/hda If you have DMA enabled then the speed should be 10's of MB and low CPU. If not then <5MB and lots of CPU. Good luck, Mark -- [email protected] mailing list
