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10.1 Really Slow (ATA Problems?) [SOLVED]


hanez
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OK. I had Mandrake 10 official and it won me over... Simply amazing kudos to the entire mandrake community for making such a powerful OS.

 

I saw 10.1 and decided to upgrade, 2 weeks of pain later I had to format everything and now I have 10.1 CE running on an AMD 2.1 Athlon with a Radeon 9200 and Soundblaster card.

 

The problem is my boot up is INCREDIBLY slow, about 5-10 minutes. It will start the booting and it will be like CPU WORKING.... PAUSING.....CPU WORKING.... PAUSING......CPU WORKING.... PAUSING.....CPU WORKING.... PAUSING.....CPU WORKING.... PAUSING...CPU WORKING.... PAUSING All the way till the desktop is loaded its like working at half speed. I had no problems like this with MDK 10.

 

I have an ATA hard drive and am not sure if that might have something to do with it... It seems that it only reads in short bursts....

 

 

I have my partitions set up like this

sda1 (my old MDK 10 partition that I havent mounted)

sda5 (1.3 GIGS of swap space)

sda6 (MDK 10.1 about 30 GIGS)

 

 

Anyone know whats going on?

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited by hanez
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I went from Winblows 2000 Pro to Mandrake 10.1CE. So far it's been interesting learning new stuff...but mostly it's been like a toy. I can't seem to completely switch over for two reasons.

 

1) Just looking at the gui (KDE 3.2) gives me a headache because of the blurry fonts everywhere, and also the somewhat messy layout. I've done about everything there is to do to attack the fonts issue and the "LookN'Feel" (it's a LOT better than it was at first) but the whole thing still looks "fuzzy" compared to Windows which was clear and had a clean look to everything.

 

2) It is freakin SLOW AS BALLS at EVERYTHING compared to any Windows machine I've ever used (3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, 2000Pro). Granted my computer is not cutting edge PIII 800 w/ 1.5gig RAM and fast HD, but it struggles compared to 2000Pro. I've also gotten more bugs/crashes in the first 2 weeks of Mandrake 10.1CE than I've gotten in the last 2 years in 2000Pro.

 

 

Also: Why the heck does OpenOffice use about 120-130meg of ram when Word 2000 for Winblows only uses 8-30meg for the same document???

 

If the look and the speed could be improved, I could see myself sticking with it, but for now it's something to play with in my spare time. Other than these 2 issues I love the power (security?) and level of customization it offers. I'm praying 10.1 Official will be different...

 

ok done ranting for today... :furious3:

 

 

hanez: mine boosts pretty fast though. I've got a Seagate 160gig 7200rpm 8MB cache drive which I think is also an Ultra ATA.

Edited by jagibbs
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hanez: press esc during boot to see the messages of what's actually happening, and let us know which stages it seems to hang up on.

 

There's also the spiffy new boot analyser one of the Fedora geeks wrote that we've been playing with on the Cooker list. So far we've found several logjams in the boot process, most of which are down to udev. It's a bit technical to use though, you have to hack around the init scripts.

 

jagibbs: I think Office loads bits of itself into memory on bootup, stealthily. so it's probably actually using more memory than it's telling you. Can't vouch for this, though. Anyway, you've got 1.5GB, who the hell cares? :) If you don't want 'blurry' fonts I guess you don't like anti-aliasing. Try this: create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory. Put this into it:

 

<match target="font" >
 <test compare="more" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
  <double>6</double>
 </test>
 <test compare="less" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
  <double>20</double>
 </test>
 <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
  <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

 

That will disable AA for fonts between 6 and 20pts in size. After you create the file, restart KDE.

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thanks for the tips. I've reconfiged my .conf file a few times already and tried with and without AA (either to blocky or too blurry...lol), and with and without sub-pixel hinting (for my LCD).

 

I don't want to steer this thread in the wrong direction though... Just wanted to add my experience with it's (10.1CE) speed both in booting and using. After additional research I've found that newer linux distros actually need a little bit faster hardware than the Windows machines...not what I had though originally.

Edited by jagibbs
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All depends on what you run on them. Stick fluxbox on with all GTK 1.2 (or better fltk or something) apps and it'll fly. People don't like the ugly, though :). I'm surprised you can't get font rendering that you like, though. Are you using the Windows fonts? Windows fonts with no AA at 75dpi should look identical to Windows really...

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defintely the wrong direction no problem though...

 

let me stress Ive HAD MDK 10 installed on this EXACT SAME BOX. The boot up for MDK10.1CE is 2-3 times SLOWER then it was for MDK10 on the SAME BOX and SAME HD.

 

I pressed escape at boot up... it doesnt seem like its slowing at any particular spot... all the way till kde loads is very slow... the hard drive reading is not a constant grind like it should be; its like... read, pause, read pause. almost like a hiccup I have yet to hear that 1 minute grind that is so common... Then once kde is totally loaded everything seems fine (but I think thats only because I dont do much cpu intensive stuff)

 

I tried burning a couple cds and it had a buffer problem when before i could burn easily. My swap space is a gig and a half... I really dont know whats going on...

 

should i just switch back to 10?

Edited by hanez
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hanez: sounds like some kind of disk access problem. Could you run dmesg while doing something disk intensive and see if there's any obvious errors? Also, check your hdparm settings: install the hdparm package, if you don't have it, and then do:

 

hdparm /dev/hda

 

(where /dev/hda is the disk you want to check). Make sure 32-bit mode transfers and DMA are turned on for all your drives.

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does this mean anything ?

 

dmesg (prints out a lot of stuff but here looks like a sda error...)

 

EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal

EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0

end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0

end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0

 

 

and

 

[root@localhost hanes]# hdparm /dev/sda

 

/dev/sda:

HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Operation not supported

IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)

readonly = 0 (off)

readahead = 256 (on)

geometry = 14593/255/63, sectors = 234441648, start = 0

 

 

 

And ideas?

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hanez: the fd0 errors appear to indicate it's trying to do something to a floppy drive. Do you have one in your system? Does it work? Are there lots of this error or just three? The stuff about sda1 is normal.

 

From the hdparm output I see you're using SATA. I think the results in this case are normal, though for an IDE disk, they'd be wrong. At least, I also have SATA and I have the same settings, and my disk performance is excellent. Hmm...this is looking tricky to diagnose :\

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i tried to use my floppy, either my floppy drive is broken or the disc i was using was broken... thats really little concern to me because I never use it anyways... (you think its slowing my computer?)

 

Attached is my whole dmesg output

 

Yeah I have an ATA drive, i guess that means SATA? I donno it worked fine with 10.0

output.txt

Edited by hanez
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Damn - there's really not much in there to help :(. The bunch of fd0 errors at the end is normal given you just tried several operations on the floppy drive; if they appeared even when you *don't* try and do anything to the floppy drive, I'd be worried. I can tell from that output you do have an SATA hard disk, so your hdparm output is normal. Only other thing I can think of is to run top and see if any process is taking an abnormal amount of resources...

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It's possible it's just some kind of issue with the SATA driver, of course. You could try reverting to the *kernel* from 10.0, without reverting the entire distribution, and see if that works. Just find the 10.0 kernel RPM from a mirror and install it. Crossing versions like this isn't usually recommended but for a kernel, oddly, it's fairly safe, as kernels install in parallel and if there's a problem you can just reboot in the other. So grab the 10.0 kernel RPM, install it, reboot and pick that kernel; see if it's any faster.

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erp, I did mean kernel 2.6 from 10.0, sorry. :). kernel 2.4 I don't play with anymore, it's odd it should break things so badly though. You should be able to fix it with a boot disk at least, I keep a copy of Move handy for emergencies. Boot Move, go to a terminal, mount your / partition in for instance /mnt/root , do 'chroot /mnt/root', then run lilo, see if that fixes it.

 

none of the kernel changes between CE and OE seem remotely likely to affect this issue so I'd imagine you'd have the same problem with OE, unfortunately.

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