Re: [gentoo-user] Weird pauses making me nuts

[Richard Fish]

Holly Bostick wrote:

>Hey, all,
>
>Sorry that this will not be an extremely clear question, but I really
>have no idea where to start, or what the problem is.
>
>Basically, my system is running "fine" (no overt problems), but about
>every 30 seconds or so, it 'pauses' to do something, and I have to wait
>for 5-10 seconds while it does it before I can go further. Or the
>display pauses, and I have to wait for the redraw , I can't tell which.
>
>

The only time I have similar state with my system is when VMware (which 
runs at niceness -10 (!!)) writes out a suspended session 
file...basically a high priority process writing a massive amount of 
data to a relatively slow device.

So a couple of things come to mind....

1. Check your dmesg and /var/log/messages files and make sure your disk 
controller isn't going through resets.  Disk controller resets will clog 
up the whole system, IME.

2. Similarly, run "smartctl -a" and check if you are getting fresh 
errors reported by the hard drive.

3. Try fiddling with process priorities.

>Memory and CPU use are not bizarre, I have a lot of processes going, but
>nothing weird or unexpected seems to be running if I can trust top and
>gnome-system-monitor. Since all the problems seem to be related to the X
>server, maybe it's an X problem; I'm currently using the VESA driver, as
>I wanted to get a clean install of the new ATI drivers when I compile
>
>

Ugh, the VESA driver is horribly slow, IME.  You would be much better 
off using the radeon driver I think.

FYI, I just tried ati-drivers-8.18.8 with kernel 2.6.14, and it builds 
fine.  I haven't tried using it yet though.  You need to accept ~x86 to 
get 8.18.8.

-Richard

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