system becomes damn slow

[hari78]

i had to reinstall mandrake 10.0 and after that the system has become extremely slow so much

that it takes several minutes to open an application. what shall be the possible causes of this? any one,please help...

also i am not able to browse through konqueror or mozilla though connection to internet is all right

thanks in advance

[devries]

Is DMA enabled on your hardrives? Open a console, log in as root and type: hdparm /dev hdx (where x is the letter of your HD). If it is not on type: hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdx.

[hari78]

thanks a lot for your reply.

in fact, there is some improvement in the speed of the system now

but when the command hdparm.. is given in konsole, the message comes:/dev not supported by hdparm.

is it any problem?

thanks in advance

[Gowator]

another possibility is your hostname resolution.

You can see the whole world except yourself :D

 

Check what /etc/resolv.conf says (should be like files, dns)

then check

/etc/hosts and make sure you have an entry.

 

also check you have no process blocking everything by typing top is a console.. X might take up a large ammount of CPU and mem but see what else might be,....

 

Try a non network dependant windows manager (like IceWM) ...

check you have anough memory

cat /proc/meminfo

and have activated swap unless you have at least 512MB mem

 

mount .. should show your swap mounted....

[hari78]

thanks a lot for your detailed reply. i have only 256 RAM. so how much space be given for swap? is the speed of the system dependent on the space available for swap?

[Gowator]

After a certain amount....

If you have 256MB then 1GB swap is plenty... 512 is probably sufficient.

 

If its not mounted automatically it might already be created....

you can check with (as root from a console)

cfdisk (don't change anything just look and quit)

 

if its created but not being used you can manually activate it with swapon (and turn it off with swapoff) once its in the /etc/fstab

 

check these.... and check what devries said too.... were jus tryuing to give hints at this point to work out what mightr have caused this... then we can try fixing it.

[hari78]

thanks for your reply

the command cf disk shows only 135 MB swap space. and RAM is 256 MB. do i have to increase the swap space? if so, what is the best way to do this?

similarly, when i give hdparm command (in response to devries's post ) now i get the follwing message in konsole

/dev/hda:

multcount = 16 (on)

IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)

unmaskirq = 0 (off)

using_dma = 1 (on)

keepsettings = 0 (off)

readonly = 0 (off)

readahead = 256 (on)

geometry = 16383/255/63, sectors = 78242976, start = 0

is there any change required?

plz help

thanking you

[Gowator]

using_dma = 1 (on)

= :D

 

However only 135 MB Swap with 256MB RAM is probably a little low....

increasing it is not simple unless you have space left on the disk?

 

If this is a new install you could try using the control centre's diskdrake to resize the partitions.... (if you have nothing to loose in terms of setup soince worse that can happen is you need to reinstall)

 

one thing to try is use fdisk as root (not cfdisk) and then use p (print) then q (quit) then you can paste the results back here if your not confident... m,eanwhile wait for someone else? Anyone else running with 256MB + 135MB ?

[sellis]

Is your network connection working? I find that my system can be very slow when it is down.

[hari78]

thank you all for your kind guidance.. now there is considerable improvement in the speed of the system

when fdisk command is given, this result is shown

Usage: fdisk [-l] [-b SSZ] [-u] device

E.g.: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first IDE disk)

or: fdisk /dev/sdc (for the third SCSI disk)

or: fdisk /dev/eda (for the first PS/2 ESDI drive)

or: fdisk /dev/rd/c0d0 or: fdisk /dev/ida/c0d0 (for RAID devices

 

similarly when p q command is given then it shows

OLDPWD not set

is there anything to be done? plz help