I've recently installed SuSE 7.3 on my laptop. Generally everything is OK, but what annoys me is when the Cron jobs get going. Every night I have user "nobody" doing "find" to update the locate databases. When this happens
performance on my computer is dreadful. In KDE, when you try to do anything it is extremely slow. This also happens when, say, moving very large files or compling a kernel (but in that case the job is in the foreground). I would have thought this kind of thing could have happened happily in the background without me knowing about it?
I was wondering if any one else had this problem, or whether it was something peculiar to my computer, and whether thare was anything simple to tweak that could fix this.
Laptop hard disks are painfully slow. They generally spin at 4200rpm, compared to 10,000rpm or more for a modern desktop based drive. Your
the options
are basically to clear as much clutter off the drive as possible so as to reduce the time the "big find" takes, and maybe to switch the find off altogether if you don't need it (or trust yourself to run it manually at convenient times).
Also, you should make sure that DMA access to the drive is enabled if supported - that can make a huge difference. What does "hdparm -t /dev/hda" tell you?
This is the output from "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda" (kernel 2.4.10-4GB, physical RAM 64MB, swap size 128MB, CPU intel celeron 600 MHz) : /dev/hda: Timing buffer cache reads: 128 MB in 1.03s = 124.27 MB/s Timing buffered disk reads: 64MB in 3.65s = 17.53 MB/s With a custom 2.4.16 kernel, the values are slightly better:- Timing buffer cache reads: 128 MB in 1.02s = 125.49 MB/s Timing buffered disk reads: 64MB in 3.47s = 18.60 MB/s Any opinions would be appreciated. Thanks, Chris