Can someone tell me why my Linux is so slow?

[beer]

When I do an 'ls' on a directory of ten items, it takes about ten seconds.

When I want to open a terminal it takes 15-20 seconds. And the GUI will lock up. And it's just unbearable.

The worst is when I want to ssh into another one of my other boxes.

if I do an 'ssh 192.168.1.101 -v -v -v' it seems to stall on 'channel 0: open confirm rwindow 0 rmax 32768.'

Can anyone explain why I am having such a difficult time getting this to move with any decent speed?

I'm running Fedora4, gnome 2.10 (?), it's a Celeron machine but it's 2.6+ GHz, these delays really aren't acceptable, I could understand slow load times of openoffice, but gedit/emacs shouldn't take 10+ seconds to load, and of course the ssh issue is the big one for me because it's what's holding up a project I'mw orking on.

 

[oog]

do you have the same problems when you're not running X?

 

[sciencewhiz]

what is the output of free, uptime, and ps -aux

 

[beer]

sorry, the sshd problem was seperate from the GUI problems
turns out the debug view didnt show what it was 'about to do' but rather, what it had already done. So it didn't hang on trying to do the rwindow xxxx, but rather resolve the DNS for some raeson...

The sshd problem was fixed by modifying the config to not use DNS.
The problem seems to have gone away, with that fix.

So moving on to why the GUI problem is so bad, I can probably look at video drivers first....

 

[SleepWalkerX]

As root type 'hdparm -Tt /dev/hdx' where x is your hard drive number (or sdx if you have sata). This tests out how fast your hard drive can access files. Oh and type the same command without the -Tt options and see if you dma is enabled.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: beer
sorry, the sshd problem was seperate from the GUI problems
turns out the debug view didnt show what it was 'about to do' but rather, what it had already done. So it didn't hang on trying to do the rwindow xxxx, but rather resolve the DNS for some raeson...

The sshd problem was fixed by modifying the config to not use DNS.
The problem seems to have gone away, with that fix.

So moving on to why the GUI problem is so bad, I can probably look at video drivers first....

ssh does reverse name lookup when you try to log into a server. The problem probably is that dns stuff is misconfigured for your network or the hosts your trying to log into. Or that dns is blocked or something like that.

For performance check to make sure that DMA access is active for your harddrive and that your using decent video card drivers. Often X will default to 'VESA' style video drivers if it can't figure it out automaticly on it's own. This is a standard fall back thing that offers no acceleration.

If your using a old or very memory limited video card switching to non-anti-aliased fonts and 16bit colors can make a very big difference.