My gentoo is getting slow!!!

[wokick]

Recently, I noticed that lots of programs are not so resposive as before.
What can be wrong? Is it normal?

[abz]

How have you got your hard drive partitioned?

How full is your hard drive (df -h)?

Are you using prelink?

What is your system specifications?

What have you got installed (cat /var/lib/portage/world)?

[gustafson]

In addition to the questions already asked, what is the time frame? Is it days, weeks, months, or years?

[wokick]

[lotw]

[Q-collective]

[abz]

99.99% of the time, if a system is running slow, its due to I/O devices, most likely the hard drive. Hence this is the reason why I asked you all those questions regarding your hard drive.

As a file system gets used more and more (and as it gets full), the OS has a harder time trying to putting file segments all on the one track along with its inode. Secondly, it has an even harder time putting things in the rotationally optimal position. This can lead to the head thrashing around during normal execution. You can prevent against this by having a more sophisticated partitioning structure. You are on the right track by having /home and /data, but should consider breaking it up further. I'm sure most of the people reading this would.

Your / partition isn't that full. What is /boot doing mounted? (just for this post?)

One thing to note is that if you are listening to music or some sort of file stream from your hard drive, the disk head has to go all the way to /data (way up the end of the hard drive to get the next 10 seconds of music assuming the music is held on /data). Then you click firefox, and the head goes all the way down the very start of your hard drive to /usr/bin/. This would be a mayor source of concern for me. I put the music I'm listening to on /home and my dvd's is /home/adamdp/archive.

I would recommend repartition your hard drive to suit your use. The long term health of you system start at installation and hence partitioning.

Here is my laptops partitioning scheme:

[gustafson]

[stonent]

It could be USE-bloat or CFLAGS-bloat.

Maybe take some time and trim down your USE flags and take a realistic look at your CFLAGS. Then do an emerge --newuse world (or is it --new-use, I forget)

Also consider getting rid of some daemons. You don't really need cups running if you never print or maybe only print once a week. Just start it when you need it.
_________________
Inspiron 4100 & Sun UltraAXe
Portage on Solaris|Dell Laptop Hacks
The way you feel about organized religion is the same way I feel about organized socialism.

[abz]

[LucaSpiller]

[abz]

[Gentree]

Saw this is a bit old but last time I hit this slow-down it was using reiserfs for /

reiserfs fragments badly with use.

Swapped to reiser4 and the speed was back. (ext3 equally does not fragment much)


_________________
Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
Gentoo because I'm a masochist
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X. Portage ~x86

[sundialsvc4]

Since you are experiencing a gradual slowdown that is now becoming objectionable, I suggest that you observe it for a little while to see exactly what the symptoms are. Is the computer becoming slow at launching programs? Is all of the memory that you expected to be in the machine, still operational? Are there "stops and starts" in performance .. such as might be caused by a marginal sector on a disk-drive that's being (for now, successfully) retried? When the system is running slowly, is it a particular application? Is it I/O that is slow? Is CPU utilization remaining low at times when the system seems to be sluggish? How about the network... could you have a problem developing there?

It has been my experience that most Unix/Linux filesystems don't require defragmentation or other such maintenance. Most of the time, they can run happily for years. This is not the DOS world anymore. But it has also been my painful experience that the drives that are sold in computer stores today are not built for continuous or heavy duty.

For the next few days, then, observe critically. Consider possibilities of what might be causing the slowdown and see if you can construct a suitable series of experiments and carry them out.

[Gentree]