On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 10:01:23 -0800, Mark Knecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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.
> 

Already knew about that. It's set to the highest setting already. As I
said, it used to work much better but it's been getting slower and
slower lately.

-- 
Justin Patrin
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