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#1 2010-09-04 03:03:46

jwhendy
Member
Registered: 2010-04-01
Posts: 621

SOLVED? Fresh install on Dell Inispiron 2200 is SLOW!

Hi,


I've been using Arch on three computers for perhaps 6 months now after switching over from Zenwalk. I have absolutely loved it. I have a 2007 Macbook (personal) and two HPs (laptop and desktop) that are newer than that for work.

I just installed Arch on my wife's older (2004?) Dell Inspiron 2200 today since Zenwalk flaked out on me when I tried to catch her up on all the updates she'd missed and just decided to give up and switch her over to Arch as well. In any case, her computer is quite "jerky." At any one time I've only had a browser (Firefox of Chrome beta), thunar and a terminal open but every once in a while things will completly hang/freeze/whatever for 5-10 seconds. It looks like the system is hung but then things will start up again.

I've only encountered this once before when I was running Linux from a flash drive with very slow write speeds so I'm not sure where to try and diagnose this problem.

free -m returns that about half of the 512MB RAM is being used so I don't think that's necessarily the problem. It's happened often when in the terminal using pacman or even just moving files around.

Any thoughts? My best looking turned up only some notes about making sure rc.conf and /etc/hosts match in the Arch FAQ.


John

Last edited by jwhendy (2011-04-19 02:28:07)

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#2 2010-09-05 07:38:21

Vamp898
Member
From: 東京
Registered: 2009-01-03
Posts: 891
Website

Re: SOLVED? Fresh install on Dell Inispiron 2200 is SLOW!

try iotop

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#3 2011-03-10 02:57:15

jwhendy
Member
Registered: 2010-04-01
Posts: 621

Re: SOLVED? Fresh install on Dell Inispiron 2200 is SLOW!

I'm going to bump this. iotop is not helpful as there is no way to run it right as the computer starts to lag heavily. Is there a way to log the output constantly or something? Or record the top mem/cpu/disk io hogs over a period of time? The computer used to run Zenwalk which was fine. Not it will literally freeze for 10+ seconds many, many times with only chrome open. The computer isn't that horrid that this should be happening.

I keep it up to date for my wife and it's running xfce.

Any and all suggestions are welcome. It's really quite intolerable.

Thanks!

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#4 2011-04-19 02:32:12

jwhendy
Member
Registered: 2010-04-01
Posts: 621

Re: SOLVED? Fresh install on Dell Inispiron 2200 is SLOW!

I might have solved this. I was thinking about the fact that I set my wife's computer up to dual boot and had her old Windows partition mounted so that she could access all of her documents without me needing to back them all up and copy them onto Arch. I looked at mount and noticed that it was mounted as type fuseblk and that seemed suspicious. I didn't have the ntfs-3g drivers installed, so perhaps that was the issue.

I started by commenting out the line in fstab and rebooting. I did not notice any of the characteristic freeze-ups for 20-30sec that used to happen. Then I installed ntfs-3g and changed the type to ntfs-3g in fstab instead of it being ntfs at present.

So far, so good. I think it's quite nice now.

I also disabled the ipv6 module and commented out the ipv6 line in /etc/hosts just to see if that helps.

Things are running well. Hope this helps someone!

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