RHEL AS 4 U2 Slow

[Rick Stevens]

On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 16:16 -0500, Brenda Radford wrote:
> Installed RHEL AS 4 U2 on an 80 GB HD (non-production, educational box).
> When I turn it on, it is slow doing all the things it does when it boots 
> up.
> After it is finished, I right-click on Open Terminal, and it takes 
> forever for a
> window to pop up. How do I find out why it is so slow?

You need to look at the output of "ps ax" or "top" and see which process
is sucking up the resources.  You then have to sort out why that's
happening.

If this is the first boot on the machine, the dread "updatedb" process
may be running.  It can take a lot of resources.  Either wait for it to
finish (it will, eventually) or kill it and let it run when your machine
isn't busy.  It is what updates the "slocate" database and typically
runs at 4:00 a.m.--provided you leave the machine on.  If you shut the
machine off and 4:00 a.m. rolls by while it's off, the process will
launch shortly after the machine boots so it can "catch up".

Of course, if you don't need the "slocate" command then disable the
updatedb process completely by editing /etc/updatedb.conf and changing
"DAILY_UPDATE=yes" to "DAILY_UPDATE=no" and killing any currently
running process.

> I have 895 MB memory and a 1995.494 MHz CPU.
> 
> The only thing I did manually in the install was to partition the hard 
> disk (from df):
> 
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda5              1004024    162144    790876  18% /
> /dev/hda1               497829     15985    456142   4% /boot
> none                    452880         0    452880   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/hda10            20161172    123016  19014016   1% /home
> /dev/hda3              2016044     35836   1877796   2% /opt
> /dev/hda8             10080488     55408   9513012   1% /tmp
> /dev/hda2             10080520   3546400   6022052  38% /usr
> /dev/hda7              5036284     42924   4737528   1% /usr/local
> /dev/hda9             10080488    147520   9420900   2% /var
> /dev/hdb1               101089     33094     62776  35% /mnt/hdb1
> /dev/hdb2             76051264  24007900  48180136  34% /mnt/hdb2
> /dev/fd0                  1424         3      1421   1% /media/floppy
> 
> I do have a second hard drive that ran RHEL AS 3, but it isn't mounted in
> /etc/fstab; it was done manually above.
> 
> I do have 2 errors in the kernel log, but I don't know what they mean:
> 
> shpchp: acpi_shpchprm:\_SB_.PCI0 evaluate _BBN fail=0x5
> shpchp: acpi_shpchprm:get_device PCI ROOT HID fail=0x5

I wouldn't worry about those.  They're related to the ACPI (Advanced
Configuration and Power Interface) system and aren't critical.  You may
wish to turn off ACPI ("chkconfig acpid off;service acpid stop") or
boot with "noacpi".

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  Time: Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.  -
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