From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Roe Peterson Subject: dell precision m50 _very_ slow paging/swapping Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 09:37:41 -0600 Sender: linux-laptop-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3E203A45.B590F101@petcom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-laptop@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Although Dell doesn't consider the precision M50 a laptop (it's a "portable workstation"), this list looks like a good place to start :-) I'm having a big problem with a brand-new M50. The symptoms persist whether I try Redhat 7.3 or 8.0. Generally, everything is fine, right up to the time the machine starts paging out to disk. Then, the system essentially grinds to a halt. The paging activity eventually gets done, and, once things are running in RAM, the machine flies. However, I've seen starting mozilla take ~45 seconds, and starting vi take 15!!! This machine: 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 Pro Mobile CPU 256MB RAM 40 GB hard drive (userland benchmarks look good - 16-18 MB/sec transfer rates) nVidia Quadro 4 GoGl video PIIX4 EIDE chipset i810 compatible sound Latest BIOS upgrade from Dell (A07) I see the same result with redhat 7.3 and 8.0. I've even disabled the PIIX support in the kernel, on the theory that something in the IDE subsystem was responsible - no change, except (as expected) user mode disk IO slowed down somewhat. I freely admit I'm confused. Dell support is: 1 - extremely frustrating 2 - totally useless And I don't even want to talk about Redhat. Can anyone point me at a theory, even??