On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 12:32:20PM +0100, Penguin Lover Jes??s Guerrero squawked: > On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 13:22:38 +0200, Dirk Uys <dirkc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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?
> > The application that is mostly involved when I get > > these long delays is FireFox, VMWare and emerge (emerge --sync). > > 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? I realize that Firefox is a memory hog, but how many tabs must be open for Swap to hit severely on a machine with 4gb ram? :) Question in general: emerge --sync and VMWare I can see, but why does FireFox require heavy disk access? (Actually, this is an honest question: my work machine had a problem yesterday where everytime I click a link in FireFox the computer freezes for about 30 seconds. Turns out the problem was that someone else's rogue process was hitting the NFS server like crazy so whatever disk-related activity FireFox does after every link click cannot get through. It is somehow worrisome that background IO like writing to the History file can lock up the UI...) W -- When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I. Sortir en Pantoufles: up 1090 days, 13:55
