Intel(r) Core?2 Duo Processors"

[Tony Nelson]

At 12:28 AM +0200 10/13/06, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>On 12/10/06, Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
>> I have a Athlon 1.2 GHz 512 MB and it is not slow on FC5, though I'm not
>> running the same mix as you are.  I think possibly something is not right
>> on your system.  Does top show a high load, or indicate that the system is
>> swapping?  Perhaps the disks are fragmented -- EXT2/3 data structures don't
>> suffer much from fragmentation, but the file data does.
>
>This is top:
>
>top - 00:26:49 up 15:35,  1 user,  load average: 0.77, 0.61, 0.67

Load seems low enough.

>Tasks: 110 total,   1 running, 109 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
>Cpu(s):  2.7% us,  0.7% sy,  0.0% ni, 96.3% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
>Mem:   1002168k total,   952200k used,    49968k free,    42264k buffers
>Swap:  1413648k total,    18460k used,  1395188k free,   575176k cached

Not using much swap.

>
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 4433 root      15   0 98.6m  56m 4944 S  1.3  5.8 347:19.29 Xorg
>10572 dotancoh  16   0 32148  15m  11m S  1.0  1.6   0:01.07 konsole
> 4829 dotancoh  15   0 25544 3684 1752 S  0.7  0.4   2:02.78 dcopserver
> 5298 dotancoh  15   0 37460  22m  16m S  0.3  2.3   2:58.72 kicker
>10574 dotancoh  16   0  2192 1112  856 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.05 top
>    1 root      16   0  1568  532  460 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.46 init
>    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
>    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
>    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
>    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.34 events/0
>    6 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 khelper
>    7 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
>    9 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.16 kblockd/0
>   10 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
>  105 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.24 pdflush
>  106 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.76 pdflush
>  108 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
>
>How can I check fragmentation. Googling the subject makes me beleive
>that this is not the case in general with Linux.

The common wisdom is that EXT2/3 are not affected by fragmentation, but
without much real-world proof that this is so.  The EXT2/3 filesystem
metadata was designed to be not much affected by fragmentation, but that
says little about the file data.  I read an article / webpage (that I can't
find right now) by someone who decided to experiment with new and used EXT2
filesystems, and found a substatial slowdown.  He was inspired to try this
because he noticed that his computer sped up when given a fresh filesystem.
You could try backing up and restoring to a fresh filesystem.  If you
spring for a new computer you'll back up and restore to the new computer.
Either way you'll get a fresh new filesystem.
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'    The Great Writ     <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '      is no more.             <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>