Slow gentoo: DMA?

[bollucks]

There are tools to assess fragmentation here:
http://davl.sourceforge.net/

There's an app to defrag here:
http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/defrag/

If your fragmentation is under 5% you probably won't gain anything with this tool

Finally, get over it, application startup on linux still sucks. It keeps getting better each year with better toolchains, gccs, glibcs, etc (c++ apps are worst offenders but open for the most gain in the future), but for the moment it sucks.

[Gentree]

thanks for the links, sadly davtools only cover ext2/3 which suffer least from fragmentation anyway.

con's script looks good (as do most things he does!) , shame I dont a framentation problem to test it on.

aparts from that FFx starts up in 3s here first time after boot, not so sucky for a big prog.

I think I can "get over" that "already".
_________________
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

[bollucks]

[Gentree]

I wasted about two weeks hacking tweeking patching and emerge -e everthinging with 4.1 near the end of last year and went back to 3.x rather pissed of with the whole thing.

I'll probably need to start FF about 2^16 times to get my 2weeks back.

Sometimes you can gain huge ammounts of time by putting up with a slight delay on startup .

Glad to see gcc-4 is coming together though. I may give it another look around 4.2

_________________
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

[erikderzweite]

I've had firefox and other programs startup problems as well. It was like pauses in CPU and disk activity while the program was starting (no slowdown for running programs although). DMA was on. It turned out this was a problem with testing version of madwifi - the system ran very smooth if not connected to the network. So I downgraded madwifi-ng and everything works fine afterwards.