Machine gets slow when copying or manipulating large files.

naelr · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 33

First off I hope I picked the correct forum. Second I have been using Linux for about 6 years now... redhat and mandrake mostly with about every other flavor thrown into the mix for 5 years.. have been using gentoo now on my router and main computer for about a year.

I just reciently reloaded my gentoo box. Wanted the new 2.6 kernel for the IDE cdburning and some other reasons. I know i could have just emerged and compiled but after reading several forums on updating, and doing a rather stupid emerge -v depclean which wiped out some very important dependencies, I was rather frustraded with trying to fix them. So a reinstall is just so much more fun, I thought what the heck right!!!!

Anyway, I am running an AMD 1800 +XP with 384 megs of ram on a reiserfs partition.
Kernel 2.6.5 and I have an NViidia GForce FX 5600 with 512 megs of ram. On an UDMA 5400 rpm HD maxtor or wester digial I think...

My problem is now ( and it didn't happen before the reinstall) when I copy a dvd or move a large file 100 megs or more over the network, or copying to a different dir... (mostly I am talking large avi's, movies and the such...) The whole system seems to slow to a crawl. I am copying a dvd with only 858 megs on it using k3b. As soon as it got to about 50 megs on the image creation the mouse got very jumpy and alt-tabing to a console was really slow .. even typing on the console is very slow...

I am not sure what other information I can offer and I have racked my brain and these forums for an answer.. perhaps it is too late in night with no more caffein in the house.

oh yea when i booted the first time I noticed in the boot up it said something about my udma not being turned on in the cmos.. well there is no place in there to turn it on anymore. it is all auto detected by the cmos.. I have since then recompiled to add other things I missed on the first compile. I doesn't say that anymore but I am still getting these lags in system preformace. Any help would be greatly apprecated.

Thanks in advance...

Naelr

camouflageX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 51

Is DMA activated? What does

naelr · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 33

/dev/hda:
using_dma = 0 (off)

camouflageX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 51

Do a

naelr · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 33

this is what I got

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

camouflageX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 51

Could you please post your Linux IDE configuration (like in menuconfig)?

Maybe an important option is missing...

Oh, and please tell us what chipset you have..

naelr · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 33

I have a via chipset

here is the ide config in menuconfig

naelr · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 33

well GUESS WHAT!!!

That was it!!! hdparm -d /dev/hda now replys

/dev/hda
using_dma = 1 (on)

Thanks alot camouflageX... for pointing me in the right direction..

camouflageX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 51

Great!