[K12OSN] Performance issue and question

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 11:42, Dean Weiten wrote:

> The main complaint that I have, and can't seem to address, is the
> performance.  Although the server is not top-of-the-line, it is a 2.6 GHz or
> so Intel Pentium with "hyperthreading" on a brand new Asus motherboard.

Are you running the smp kernel to take advantage of hyperthreading?
'uname -a' should show a kernel version with smp in the name.

> That is, it takes an awfully long time for any given selected program to
> load.  In some cases, I can wait up to 5 or 10 seconds, just to load a shell
> (Xterm or whatever).  You can sometimes click on an item, and the disk isn't
> accessed for 3 to 5 seconds.

What kind of hard drives? IDE's are slower, but it really only shows up
in heavy multiuser use. 'hdparm -t -T /dev/hda' should show 40+MB/sec
for the buffered disk reads. If it is a lot less you might have a cable
problem.

> I had assumed that second copies would load faster - but that is not the
> case.

How much RAM do you have?

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com