2009/12/2 Jesús Guerrero <i92gu...@terra.es> > On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 13:22:38 +0200, Dirk Uys <dirkc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi > > > > This has been bothering me for some time now. I have a Dell PC at work, > > Intel Core2 Duo with 4gb ram etc. Whenever something does a lot of disk > > access, the PC slows down to a halt? I remember some issue between > Firefox > > and the kernel causing long pauses, but I've had several different > kernel > > versions running. > > > > I also use the ntfs-3g driver for write access to a doze partition, but > > although the degradation in performance more severe with the ntfs-3g > > driver, > > access to the native (ext3) partition also drags the system down for a > > while. > > > > I checked obvious things like whether or not I enable SMP in the kernel. > I > > tried changing the kernel pre-emption from low latency desktop to > desktop, > > but the problem persist. The application that is mostly involved when I > get > > these long delays is FireFox, VMWare and emerge (emerge --sync). > > Everything > > is compiled 64bit but I have the 32bit emulation libs. > > > > Can anyone point me into some direction? > > > > Regards > > Dirk > > I know I am hitting at the obvious, but I can't be sure you already > checked that. > > Since the applications you are using can be quite intensive in memory > usage, did you check whether you are hitting swap or not? > > -- > Jesús Guerrero > >
It's possible, but I don't remember running into swap that much. If I ran VMWare, I normally use a machine with 2GB memory. But still, my system at home which use to have 512mb didn't run into swap with firefox running a similar amount of tabs (I normally have about 12 tabs open of which most is static HTML - reference docs) I'll try to see if there is something else eating RAM and causing me to go into swap. Thanks Dirk
