Poor disk drive performance with FC3 RC3

[Steffen Persvold]

Hi all,

I just recently installed FC3 RC3 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop and
experienced _really_ wierd hard-drive performance (IDE drive). At first
I noticed it when trying to start applications such as Evolution,
FireFox, OpenOffice etc. but then I started testing it with hdparm -t :

# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   38 MB in  5.65 seconds =   6.72 MB/sec

# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   14 MB in  4.38 seconds =   3.20 MB/sec

# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:    2 MB in  3.48 seconds = 588.26 kB/sec

First I was thinking PIO vs. DMA, but DMA was turned on (confirmed with
hdparm -d). I know this didn't happen with FC2 so I tested the latest
FC2 kernel (2.6.8-521) but that didn't even help.

So then I started looking at some of the processes I didn't recognize
from FC2, and actually think I found the culprit.

If I stopped the "haldaemon" service (hald) my hard-driver performance
was back to normal :

# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   84 MB in  3.03 seconds =  27.74 MB/sec

# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   84 MB in  3.03 seconds =  27.73 MB/sec



What is the purpose of the "haldaemon" and why is it destroying my
system performance ?

Best regards,
Steffen Persvold