From a hardware point of view, I'd take a look at that single IDE driveas your most likely bottleneck. You've got so much processor for so little disk performace. A few parallel makes pegging your CPUs at 100% will most likely also be hitting your drive pretty hard. Those 8MB WD drives, while they show great sequential transfer speeds (read: disk benchmarks) suffer from slow seeks which will be the thing you'll notice in desktop responsiveness. I've got a very similar setup but with some quicker (seek time) Maxtor drives in software RAID5. I'd suggest that you look into maybe another WD drive in software RAID0 to bring your disk bandwidth on par with your CPus.
Before you do that, you may want to look at a 2.6 kernel - my MPX box seems to have taken quite fondly to the new kernels. I'm currently using Lovechild's collection of patches and desktop responsiveness is a great deal better than vanilla 2.6 and anything I tried in 2.4. My box feels much 'snappier' than with a ck patched 2.4 kernel and it has been far more stable. The ebuild and patches for love-sources can be found here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=109557 and there is a 2.4 to 2.6 migration thread here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=70838
Also, do you have PORTAGE_NICENESS set in /etc/make.conf? Is your seti client running at idle priority?
-- Thomas Achtemichuk
On 11/30/03 19:36:34, Lotas T Smartman wrote:
ok. im not 100% sure if its a software problem, and im hoping its not a hardware problem, but when im doing a few things at once (compiling something, [EMAIL PROTECTED], and browsing the web) my system gets really slow. i installed linux a few days ago and i cant really under stand why. even typing this email is slow (letters comming up after the next one has been typed). my load average is 3.33, 3.34, 2.79. i have a dual AMD Athlon 2Gz, 1Gb ram (666mb free) 1 gb swap (980 total, 980 free). the drive is a western digital 120Gb special edition with 8mb cache. hdparm -tT /dev/hda shows: /dev/hda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 460 MB in 2.15 seconds = 214.45 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 144 MB in 3.03 seconds = 47.52 MB/sec im using the kernel from genkernel (2.4.20, like the boot cd). Any ideas? Thanks in advance. -- Lotas T Smartman, MCP www.lotas-smartman.net www.the-hairy-one.com www.lsn-blog.tk
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