Re: dell precision m50 _very_ slow paging/swapping

[Andrew McGregor]

Have you tried hdparm to see if the disk is in a stupid mode and needs 
something (DMA most likely) switched on to perform?  Dell BIOSes often get 
this wrong.  idebus=66 on the kernel command line is appropriate too.

Andrew

--On Saturday, January 11, 2003 10:12:55 -0800 Andrew Morton 
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sat January 11 2003 07:37, Roe Peterson wrote:
>>
>> Although Dell doesn't consider the precision M50 a laptop (it's a
>> "portable workstation"), this list
>> looks like a good place to start :-)
>>
>> I'm having a big problem with a brand-new M50.  The symptoms persist
>> whether I try Redhat 7.3
>> or 8.0.
>>
>> Generally, everything is fine, right up to the time the machine starts
>> paging out to disk.  Then, the
>> system essentially grinds to a halt.
>>
>
> You'd need to determine whether the CPU is busy or idle when this is
> happening.
>
> If it's busy, profile the kernel:
>
> - boot with "profile=1" on the kernel command line
>
> -
> 	readprofile -r
> 	<do something>
> 	readprofile -v -m /boot/System.map | sort -n +2 | tail -40
>
> It it's not busy, then:
>
> while true
> do
> 	ps axl | grep ' D '
> 	sleep 1
> done &
> <do something>
>
>
>
> -
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