I'm trying to discover the cause of some long delays in the running of a program. I'm running a Perl script that is comparing the files in two directories. There are about 150,000 files of a few KB each in each directory, which mostly correspond but they're not all identical. My script is running diff on each pair. It prints a timestamped line for each pair and this scrolls up the screen but sometimes stops for several seconds - ten is the most I've noticed - Is this normal? As you would expect, the disk activity light is on all the time. The directories are in the same reiserfs filesystem on a 120 GB PATA disk. hdparm -t says 53 MB/s and -T says 2015 MB/s. It's a 2.8 GHz P4 on an Intel 875P mobo with 2 GB memory. I've just upgraded the system to Suse 9.1; kernel 2.6.4-52. Cheers, Dave