On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 19:22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi, > I've grumbled occasionally, without providing a lot of information, > about sporadically abysmal response times, especially when background > cron jobs such as slocate, tripwire-check and makewhatis were running. > Symptoms shown by top were load averages of 3-6 while cpu > was 95-98% idle. Interactive response was bad - and, when ssh logins > kept timing out yesterday, I decided it was time > to look more closely at the problem. > > It turned out to be incompatibilty between my hard drives. > My system drive was a Quantum 13GB drive running UDMA2 on a Dell > optiplex P2-266 (Intel PIIX-something chipset). > Tests with hdparm -t -T reported about 18-19 MB/s xfer rate. > I added a second drive for data - Seagate 30GB. The Dell cabling > is too short to connect the second HDD to the second ide channel > along with the CD, so I put it as slave (hdb) to the system disc (hda). > I tested it and got 20MB/s, so I figured it was OK in that configuration. > What I didn't do was recheck the system disk - until yesterday - > which was now giving 1 MB/s (booting single user I could get it > to 2 MB/s). All indications were that both drives were still configured > for UDMA-2. Disconnecting the slave drive got it back to normal. > > The solution was to get a longer ide cable and put the 30GB data > drive as hdc and the cdrom as hdd. > Now slocate.cron still takes 9 sec user and 18 sec system time, but > the elapsed time is 5 minutes instead of 30! > And I don't notice it.
Thanks for the post Cameron. I for one appreciate it when people take the time to post solutions found to ongoing problems. Bret -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
