

Re: hard disk access on every keystroke in console mode!

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 01:00:33AM -0500, michelle wrote:
| Every time I perform a keypress at the console (command line, nano, etc.) I 
| can hear a tick from the hard disk.

Lack of memory could result in symptons like this.  The 8MB "router"
at my parents' house nearly does this because it has to swap so much.

| Also, compiling from the console is almost 4 times slower than compiling 
| from inside KDE3. This doesn't make sense to me.

Are you using the vesa framebuffer video driver at a high resolution?
I do, and scrolling output on the screen is slow (slow video hardware,
high CPU and bus bandwidth utilization).  This causes other processes
to receive fewer resources and thus take more real time to complete
their task.  Likewise, if I "shade" the xterm window in which much
output is being produced, then less time is spend updating the video
and more time is spent on the actual compilation.

| Every now and then I also get some pauses for a couple seconds that freeze 
| my mouse and keyboard, cause cd skips, etc. This happens both at the 
| command line and in KDE. The kernel preemption doesn't seem to have helped. 
| Is there something I can do about this as well? It's kind of annoying. It 
| doesn't seem to matter if I'm doing a lot of things (playing the cd, 
| playing a couple wave files, a couple of midis, and some text editors) or 
| next to nothing (in nano with no guis running at all).

What CPU?  How much memory?  What speed memory?  What sort of disks
(bus type, speed, etc.)?  What does 'hdparm /dev/hda' report?

It sounds like you're hitting a bottleneck in the hardware


Through love and faithfulness sin is atoned for;
through the fear of the Lord a man avoids evil.
        Proverbs 16:6

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