Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
Willie Wong wrote: Is there anyway to tell if the harddrive is failing in real time? emerge smartmontools man smartd Benno -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
Le lundi 28 février 2005 à 10:17 -0800, Justin Patrin a écrit : On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:58:30 -0500, Bill Roberts If you hard disk is 90% full or better, it will be dog slow. Yes, it is 90% full currently. I believe I still have the problem when more is free, though. Check it if possible, because it looks like an easy explanation of the problem, with an easy (or impossible) fix. The limit given at http://www.namesys.com/faq.html#full-disk is 85%, and they say it's a bad idea(TM) to use such a full disk if one needs speed. :-( Fred -- Frédéric Grosshans [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
I originally installed Gentoo on my server box a very long time ago (3-4 years I think) and it's still running strong. However, I'm noticing *big* lags when doing anything HD related. Even starting up simple programs takes some waiting while the HD is accessed. During large operations (say another box rsyncing to this one) it's much much slower thanit should be. I've checked top and my CPU is 90+% waiting for IO. This is certainly not right. There is plenty of unused RAM, no active swapping is being done AFAIK. I formatted my main partition with ReiserFS 3.6. It's worked fine up until now (and my new Gentoo box seems wiht with ReiserFS). This feels like a disk fragmentation issue, although I have no way to back that up. Does anyone have any tips for me? -- Justin Patrin -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On 09:39 Mon 28 Feb , Justin Patrin wrote: I originally installed Gentoo on my server box a very long time ago (3-4 years I think) and it's still running strong. However, I'm noticing *big* lags when doing anything HD related. Even starting up simple programs takes some waiting while the HD is accessed. During large operations (say another box rsyncing to this one) it's much much slower thanit should be. I've checked top and my CPU is 90+% waiting for IO. This is certainly not right. There is plenty of unused RAM, no active swapping is being done AFAIK. I formatted my main partition with ReiserFS 3.6. It's worked fine up until now (and my new Gentoo box seems wiht with ReiserFS). This feels like a disk fragmentation issue, although I have no way to back that up. Does anyone have any tips for me? What does df -h say? If you hard disk is 90% full or better, it will be dog slow. Bill Roberts -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 09:39:30 -0800, Justin Patrin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I originally installed Gentoo on my server box a very long time ago (3-4 years I think) and it's still running strong. However, I'm noticing *big* lags when doing anything HD related. Even starting up simple programs takes some waiting while the HD is accessed. During large operations (say another box rsyncing to this one) it's much much slower thanit should be. I've checked top and my CPU is 90+% waiting for IO. This is certainly not right. There is plenty of unused RAM, no active swapping is being done AFAIK. I formatted my main partition with ReiserFS 3.6. It's worked fine up until now (and my new Gentoo box seems wiht with ReiserFS). This feels like a disk fragmentation issue, although I have no way to back that up. Does anyone have any tips for me? It sounds like you do not have DMA enabled for this drive. I'm hesitant to give instructions as enabling DMA on some older machines is documented by kernel folks as potentially a bad thing. (Causes corruption, etc.) That said you can look at the status using hdparm /dev/hda (change as needed) and you can check speed using hdparm -tT /dev/hda If you have DMA enabled then the speed should be 10's of MB and low CPU. If not then 5MB and lots of CPU. Good luck, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:58:30 -0500, Bill Roberts [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 09:39 Mon 28 Feb , Justin Patrin wrote: I originally installed Gentoo on my server box a very long time ago (3-4 years I think) and it's still running strong. However, I'm noticing *big* lags when doing anything HD related. Even starting up simple programs takes some waiting while the HD is accessed. During large operations (say another box rsyncing to this one) it's much much slower thanit should be. I've checked top and my CPU is 90+% waiting for IO. This is certainly not right. There is plenty of unused RAM, no active swapping is being done AFAIK. I formatted my main partition with ReiserFS 3.6. It's worked fine up until now (and my new Gentoo box seems wiht with ReiserFS). This feels like a disk fragmentation issue, although I have no way to back that up. Does anyone have any tips for me? What does df -h say? If you hard disk is 90% full or better, it will be dog slow. Yes, it is 90% full currently. I believe I still have the problem when more is free, though. -- Justin Patrin -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 10:01:23 -0800, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 09:39:30 -0800, Justin Patrin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I originally installed Gentoo on my server box a very long time ago (3-4 years I think) and it's still running strong. However, I'm noticing *big* lags when doing anything HD related. Even starting up simple programs takes some waiting while the HD is accessed. During large operations (say another box rsyncing to this one) it's much much slower thanit should be. I've checked top and my CPU is 90+% waiting for IO. This is certainly not right. There is plenty of unused RAM, no active swapping is being done AFAIK. I formatted my main partition with ReiserFS 3.6. It's worked fine up until now (and my new Gentoo box seems wiht with ReiserFS). This feels like a disk fragmentation issue, although I have no way to back that up. Does anyone have any tips for me? It sounds like you do not have DMA enabled for this drive. I'm hesitant to give instructions as enabling DMA on some older machines is documented by kernel folks as potentially a bad thing. (Causes corruption, etc.) That said you can look at the status using hdparm /dev/hda (change as needed) and you can check speed using hdparm -tT /dev/hda If you have DMA enabled then the speed should be 10's of MB and low CPU. If not then 5MB and lots of CPU. Already knew about that. It's set to the highest setting already. As I said, it used to work much better but it's been getting slower and slower lately. -- Justin Patrin -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
Does anyone have any tips for me? FWIW, boot on my box, a K6-2, with gentoo on an ATA drive complained that DMA was turned off and that this would cause fsck to be very slow. I tried adding hdparm something something as recommended in the handbook but without success. Then I did emerge udev and the problem(or, at least, the reporting of it) went away. -mw __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Monday 28 February 2005 19:18, Justin Patrin wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 10:01:23 -0800, Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 09:39:30 -0800, Justin Patrin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: hdparm /dev/hda (change as needed) and you can check speed using hdparm -tT /dev/hda If you have DMA enabled then the speed should be 10's of MB and low CPU. If not then 5MB and lots of CPU. Already knew about that. It's set to the highest setting already. As I said, it used to work much better but it's been getting slower and slower lately. * Have a tail -f running on your syslog to see if accesses generate hard- or software errors. * Look in your boot messages if your filesystem mentions something about fragmentation (but, not all FS types do). Ext2 says something like xx/yyy files (z.z% non-contiguous) but I have no info about others. * If you really think fragmentation is the culprit, you could copy all the files to a new disk (and back, if so desired). This will deal with any and all fragmentation. Maarten -- bash-2.05b$ emerge ncy -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Justin Patrin wrote: Already knew about that. It's set to the highest setting already. As I said, it used to work much better but it's been getting slower and slower lately. If its 3 or 4 years old I would try replacing it. (And dont buy Maxtor - they suck). -- A. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
I had a 40 GB Maxtor ATA drive in my server running Slack for a while, then Gentoo. I had a similar problem with the drive getting slower and slower all the time. Now it will read at less that 5MB / Sec, sometimes under 1 with only 5% of the drive used. Tried on multiple machines and confirmed that UDMA was enabled. I agree... Don't buy Maxtor! Michael Turcotte Information Systems City of North Bay 200 McIntyre St. E PO Box 360 North Bay, Ontario P1B 8H8 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cityofnorthbay.ca -Original Message- From: A. Khattri [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 2:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Justin Patrin wrote: Already knew about that. It's set to the highest setting already. As I said, it used to work much better but it's been getting slower and slower lately. If its 3 or 4 years old I would try replacing it. (And dont buy Maxtor - they suck). -- A. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Mike Turcotte wrote: I had a 40 GB Maxtor ATA drive in my server running Slack for a while, then Gentoo. I had a similar problem with the drive getting slower and slower all the time. Now it will read at less that 5MB / Sec, sometimes under 1 with only 5% of the drive used. Tried on multiple machines and confirmed that UDMA was enabled. I agree... Don't buy Maxtor! We've had a few of them fail (less than a year old so under warranty but still). In contrast, I have a Seagate in another server that's worked flawlessly for 4 years (and Seagate's have a 5 year warranty). So its worth paying a bit more to get quality. -- A. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Monday 28 February 2005 04:25 pm, Mike Turcotte wrote: I had a 40 GB Maxtor ATA drive in my server running Slack for a while, then Gentoo. I had a similar problem with the drive getting slower and slower all the time. Now it will read at less that 5MB / Sec, sometimes under 1 with only 5% of the drive used. Tried on multiple machines and confirmed that UDMA was enabled. I agree... Don't buy Maxtor! Michael Turcotte Information Systems City of North Bay 200 McIntyre St. E PO Box 360 North Bay, Ontario P1B 8H8 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cityofnorthbay.ca -Original Message- From: A. Khattri [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 2:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Justin Patrin wrote: Already knew about that. It's set to the highest setting already. As I said, it used to work much better but it's been getting slower and slower lately. If its 3 or 4 years old I would try replacing it. (And dont buy Maxtor - they suck). I find it odd how success with hardware brands varies from person to person. Sometimes even from business to business Over here, we run Maxtor Diamond Max drives, 7200rpm, 8meg cache, ata 133 in just about everything. The model numbers escape me (I'm home now), but they run the range from 120gig to 200gig and... they just keep running and running and running, ne errors or slow downs. Yes, they do fail from time to time, but so does/did everything else we tried. If your bios is smartdrive capable, turn it on and see if it reports problems. Cheers and good night. P.S. Here in New Jersey, where I live, we got a wonderful 8 of snow today. -- ** Registered Linux User Number 185956 FSF Associate Member number 2340 since 05/20/2004 Join me in chat at #linux-users on irc.freenode.net Buy an Xbox for $149.00, run linux on it and Microsoft loses $150.00! 9:25pm up 142 days, 5:11, 8 users, load average: 0.09, 0.13, 0.09 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 09:50:56PM -0500, Jerry McBride wrote: I find it odd how success with hardware brands varies from person to person. Sometimes even from business to business Over here, we run Maxtor Diamond Max drives, 7200rpm, 8meg cache, ata 133 in just about everything. The model numbers escape me (I'm home now), but they run the range from 120gig to 200gig and... they just keep running and running and running, ne errors or slow downs. Yes, they do fail from time to time, but so does/did everything else we tried. If your bios is smartdrive capable, turn it on and see if it reports problems. Cheers and good night. P.S. Here in New Jersey, where I live, we got a wonderful 8 of snow today. You guys are really making me freak out about my Maxtor harddrive. How exactly does SMART work? I had that working in one of the IBM thinkpads before, but it only gave me warning on boot-time when the drive failed. Is there anyway to tell if the harddrive is failing in real time? Thanks, W PS. Here in another part of Jersey, we got a miserable 3 inches. Not enough to cancel school, but enough to make life miserable. -- * Address: 45 Spelman Hall, Princeton University 08544 * * Phone: x68958 AIM: AngularJerk* *E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]From: sep.dynalias.net * There is no answer. There is no question. There is only the road, which stretches out in front of you, an endless night of coffee, technical manuals, snack food wrappers, disgruntled family members, and hundreds of hours spent struggling to become adept. Or you can hire a consultant. -- Tom Oehser Sortir en Pantoufles: up 5 days, 19:44 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] *SLOW* hard drive
On Tuesday 01 March 2005 05:18, Willie Wong wrote: On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 09:50:56PM -0500, Jerry McBride wrote: You guys are really making me freak out about my Maxtor harddrive. How exactly does SMART work? I had that working in one of the IBM thinkpads before, but it only gave me warning on boot-time when the drive failed. Is there anyway to tell if the harddrive is failing in real time? Smart checks some parameters of operations, plus there are some tests. If one of this parameters grow above a certain treshould, a warning is spilled. SMART will most probably not save you from sudden harddisk death, but can warn you about a harddisk going to be weak and dying soon. So, it is a good thing. Activate smart in the bios, install smartmontools and let smartd run. PS. Here in another part of Jersey, we got a miserable 3 inches. Not enough to cancel school, but enough to make life miserable. and here in the Harz, wie have ~50cm ;) -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
