Dell precision M50 and _very_ slow process startup

Dell precision M50 and _very_ slow process startup

[Roe Peterson]

After _quite_ a bit more investigation, and some good pointers from
the net (thanks, all!), this has turned out _not_ to be a problem
with swapping/paging at all.

For some reason, the magicdev process slows the system to a crawl!

I'm guessing that this process watches for cd insertion, changes
to home directory, et. al.

There seems to be no man page or info for magicdev itself.

Does anyone know more about this beast?

I've solved the problem temporarily by simply renameing
/usr/bin/magicdev...

Re: Dell precision M50 and _very_ slow process startup

[Ian Collier]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 10:27:32AM -0600, Roe Peterson wrote:
> I'm guessing that this process watches for cd insertion, changes
> to home directory, et. al.

Something like that.  I think it's part of GNOME and is responsible for
making sure there's a CD icon on the screen, or something.

We had a different problem with this beast after installing RH6 some
time ago.  Every few seconds it would cause a spew of messages to the
syslog reporting basically what we knew: there is no CD in the drive.
It turned out though that these messages went away when the CD was
properly reconfigured as a CD-writer by appending "hdc=ide-scsi" to
the boot parameters.  Not that this is at all relevant...

Anyway, no I don't know much about it.

imc