In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Roger Hayter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
I should be most grateful for advice on how to investigate this problem
further. I have installed opensuse 10.3 on a P5A-B motherboard (Aladdin
V chipset) with 512MB of SDRAM, Cyrix MII-300 processor. This runs
slowly, with somewhat garbled graphics (ATI Radeon 7000) if I use X
windows. Without X windows, in run level 3, the load average after
booting (and after it has done various database things and settled) is
about 0.50. Even if I start it with so-called safe mode and remove all
loadable modules apart from those needed to drive the IDE interface the
load average never falls below about 0.20. In the first case the CPU
usage is about 60% idle and about 30% "si" (is this context switching?).
In the second, CPU is about 95% idle, but the load average varies from
0.16 to 0.22.
I assume some driver or high priority kernel process too
fundamental to show up by "ps" is in a loop occupying processor time.
Certainly the machine is even more sluggish than the hardware should
warrant (and I am using older hardware in a router running SuSE 10.1
with load averages about .01 to .02).
This is clearly too vague for a bug report, can anyone suggest
how I can pin this down more, for instance find out where the CPU is
spending most of its time?
As a matter of interest this is almost completely explained by the
resources used by "top". This little programme increases the load
average from about .02 to about .25 with significant values for "wait"
and "context switching". I was testing with it running in another
console, in the erroneous belief it would make little difference. I am
sure it didn't used to be such a great consumer of resources!
--
Roger Hayter
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