Re: [gentoo-user] Very bad system response

["Hemmann, Volker Armin" <volker.armin.hemmann@tu-clausthal.de>]

On Dienstag, 6. Februar 2007, Pierre-Yves Rofes wrote:
> On Tue, February 6, 2007 9:29 pm, Michael Schreckenbauer wrote:
> > Hi List,
> > I have a very strange thing here. I don't know when this started, but my
> > feeling is, that it was around kernel 2.6.15 and it's getting worse with
> > each
> > version.
> > From time to time my system comes to a complete halt, that means not a
> > single
> > application shows any response to mouse and/or keyactions, sshing into it
> > takes forever. After a while (up to ~30s ) normal reaction is back again.
> > Strange thing is, there is no activity at the times this happens. Reading
> > email and browsing the web is all that is needed. CPU is at 3-5%
> > according to
> > top, mem has ~1GB free according to free.
> > I can somehow force this behaviour by doing some harddisc io, eg untaring
> > a
> > kernel-tarball. But it does not happen everytime I do this.
> > This is really, really annoying. I have no idea, if this is a kernel, a
> > FS or
> > any other issue. Any help with this is most welcome.
> > Some additional info: fs is xfs, kernel is 2.6.19-gentoo-r4 and I'm a
> > KDE-User, but this also happens with xfce4 ;)
>
> Maybe a faulty hard drive with bad sectors that can't be read. Anything in
> /var/log/messages or any other log file?
>
> --
> Pierre-Yves Rofes

I am not sure that something is 'broken'. His problem is like mine... heavy 
disk i/o kills performance. And if the box hits swap, everything sucks.... 
because for some reason, always the wrong stuff is swapped out ;)

Really, sometimes, it is like every single bit is fetched individually from 
the swap space...
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