From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: I have a Dell lattitude 840 laptop running at 2Ghz with 1G of main memory and 2G of swap. However, starting a program takes a long time. Even a simple program like freecell can take about 20 seconds. It never took this long using 7.3. Large programs like eclipse or openoffice are even worse. It might be disk related since during a program start there will be times when CPU utilization is zero, but the disk is still or flashing very intermittedly. If I run the same program again, it is usually quick to start since it will be in memory already. Using hdparm I see that I have DMA on and read-ahead. Most of my disks are under LVM: all of them except swap, root, and boot. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.start a largish program from the menu 2. 3. Actual Results: slow startup with a lot of CPU and disk idle time Expected Results: faster startup with heavy CPU utilization and disk activity Additional info:
I reinstalled RH8.0 and removed LVM, but I still see the same behavior. Initial program start is very slow. Even doin a 'man ls' takes about 15 seconds the first time. The disk light is naver full on, but always sputtering.
I have done some additional investigation and I have found that the problem is with a program called magicdev. If I kill this program my IDE hard drive speed will double and my program startup times return to normal. I found the bug 73661 which seems to mention a similar type of problem, so this is probably a dupe of that. Interesting side note: I installed redhat 8.1 beta (Phobe) and the problem doesn't occur.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/