Hello Roe. Besides special hardware-related issues, I can imagine two main-lines to consider. Sorry, no simple answer but instead a bunch of questions here from me...
1. Provided that by 'paging out to disk' you mean swapping: What services are you running ? esp. what servers. Would be interesting to know with what you reach the level of intensive swapping at all, beyond 256 MB Ram. Mozilla caching, and/or proxies ? Look into 'top' and 'ps aux | less' within a shell when system slows down. What size are your swaps, what says your /etc/fstab and mtab also. Perhaps you can post some more info's about. 2. Something with ide-drivers and/or filesystem: Check your kernel- .config, with 'make menuconfig' or something alike, esp. the block-device-section. Lookup dmesg and syslog carefully. dma is alright there ? Run e2fsck and debugfs ( or other tools appropriate to your filesystem ). There may be more wickened things beyond screen an keyboard, of course ;-) Anyway, providing more informations to the list would be useful. hth -- michl Roe Peterson schrieb zu dell precision m50 _very_ slow paging/swapping: > I'm having a big problem with a brand-new M50. The symptoms persist > whether I try Redhat 7.3 > or 8.0. > Generally, everything is fine, right up to the time the machine starts > paging out to disk. Then, the > system essentially grinds to a halt. > 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 Pro Mobile CPU > 256MB RAM > 40 GB hard drive (userland benchmarks look good - 16-18 MB/sec > transfer rates) > nVidia Quadro 4 GoGl video > PIIX4 EIDE chipset > i810 compatible sound > Latest BIOS upgrade from Dell (A07)
