Hello Jack, Thank you for your response.
How much main memory (RAM) is in the machine?
512MB RAM and 133MB swap space.
What are the major programs that run on the machine?
kfm, squid, sendmail, Roxen webserver with modules.
Allot of processes run on the machine? (ps aux | wc -l)
The total of 58 processes are on my Linux server. 57 are sleeping.
What this "typically" sounds like, is you are running out of RAM and Linux is forced to swap out programs and data from main memory onto hard disk so that it can have enough RAM for the program that needs to execute "next".
I think I have plenty of RAM 512MB and swap is never being used.
Also do a `ps aux | more` and look at all the programs running. Do you need all of these programs running on a firewall / proxy machine? For example you probably don't need a full blown KDE desktop with Netscape running 24/7 on a 486 machine that does nothing but filter network packets. Kill X/KDE and just use the command line. (This is just an example, I don't know what, if anything you are running on the machine).
If it is a workstation/server you will have to take into account "what is more important?" Is it better to use Kmail and slow down the entire networks IO or use elm and have no bottlenecks.
Yes indeed my Linux box is a workstation/server machine. But I don't think that it is under heavy load even with all those applications you've mentioned above. Personally I can't see evidental bottlenecks in this system. My Linux box is PIII 600 dual processor machine with all SCSI devices, SCSI WD U/2 LVD 80MB/sec hard drives with 100MB network cards and ADSL connection to the Internet. So I still don't know what could be wrong with the hard drives. Thanks, Alex -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/