On Thu, 30 Mar, Philippe De Ryck wrote: > On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 11:45 +0100, N.Pauli wrote: > > Dear All, > > > > All of a sudden my machine has become incredibly slow to boot up and to > > launch anything - boot up took over 5 minutes and launching an app like > > Mozilla or OpenOffice can take just as long. All the while > the harddisk drive light is burning constantly. It is as if there is some > process that never completes, takes a long time to time out and restarts > itself whenever I launch an app. Once I'm in, apps seem > to run fairly normally. I've looked at 'top' and can't see any culprit there. > I had this happen once before and it was solved by making sure that nothing > was plugged in to a usb port while booting up or > even logging on. The last significant things I have done prior to this > happening do a normal update and upgrade using Synaptic and install Liferea. > > > > Can anybody give me any clues on where I can start looking to resolve this? > > The machine is a 1100 Mhz Intel Celeron with 256 Mb RAM so it shouldn't be > > struggling. I'm running Debian GNU/Linux testing > / unstable and the 2.6.12-1-386 kernel. > > > > Thanks, > > Nigel > > > > -- > > Nigel Pauli > > Network Manager > > St. John's School, Northwood > > > > Just an idea, but you might look into HDD-trouble. See what "hdparm > -tT /dev/..." says. See what "smartctl -a /dev/..." says (good > explanation can be found here: > http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983). > > Maybe a monitor for disk activity can be useful too (gkrellm for example > shows activity and speed). >
Thanks for all the advice and help. In the end it did turn out to be hardware related and not the fault of GConf. I'd run 'hdparm -tT /dev/hda' in single user mode and when running from a live disk and seen only a marginal improvement in the timing of buffered disk reads but a smartctl self test returned no errors even though it took 21 minutes rather than 2 minutes to run I was just about to take out the hard drive to run it in a different machine when a colleague suggested taking out a memory module. As soon as I took them both out it seemed a very good idea - one was 128Mb and the other 256Mb from different manufacturers. I returned only the 256Mb module, rebooted and everything flew. I'm going to keep monitoring the system for a while but I do reckon that I now have a happy ending. Once again, thanks everyone for all your help and advice. Nigel -- Nigel Pauli Network Manager St. John's School, Northwood -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
