Linux installed.. running "jerky"

[jbass]

First system specs:

Shuttle SN95G5
Athlon A64 3500+
Crucial 1gig 3200 ddr
HD1: WD 30gig system drive
HD2: Maxtor 300gig SATA
BFG 6800GT video card

I have had my box since around christmas time and run winXP pro as my main OS. My first setup on the box was winxp pro on partition 1 of the 30gig, and Fedora Core 2 on a 200gig drive (partition 1 of 5 gigs and remainder used as storage).

Due to work/school and other things i never really played around in Fedora, but it did seem to run fine (had some difficulties with sound card)

Now, i have decided to load up Fedora Core 3 64bit edition. I have WinXp on the first 24gigs of HD1, and Fedora C3 on the last 5 gigs of HD1. Both boot fine and xp runs perfect. However when I boot into Fedora C3, it runs really jerky. As an example, if i steadily drag the mouse across the screen, every 1-1.5 seconds, it hangs for a split second and then jumps 1/2" to catch up to where it should be. This symptom is constant and seems to be at normal intervals (~1 second)..

What could be causing this? I have done no changes to the Fedora configuration. Could it be the fact that it is at the end of the harddrive? Could i have partitioned the fedora sections incorrectly? i wasnt sure how much to give each partition (root, /usr...etc...)

Please help. i would like to learn linux (i know a little), but this is annoying..

 

[drag]

Hard to say.

Did you setup a swap partition?

My first guess is that your running out of disk space and the system is going haywire digging around on the disk trying to find space. Probably getting fragmented, too. (which generally doesn't happen in Linux until you get under 5-10% free disk space).

What you need to do is to isolate the problem down to what exactly is going haywire.

Open up a terminal and run some commands..
type:
uptime
to see what your load is. This is not a definate answer, what the load is is how many proccesses are waiting in the proccessing que.. Very high loads can be caused by screwy disk I/O

df
df -h
df shows the space usage on various mount points. Adding the -h switch puts it into 'human' terms, like megs or gigs.

Next check out 'top' output.
top
Top is a command to monitor memory/cpu as well as other stats on various proccesses. It will show what proccess is hogging the cpu.

I think that you don't realy have that much disk space aviable...

 

[bersl2]

That sounds like some bad interactivity problems.

Yes, use top to find out what's hogging CPU time and memory. It could also be that the default Fedora kernel is not fully preemptive, in which case there ought to be some kind of package that has a kernel with the appropriate options.

If it's due to heavy I/O activity (a monitor like gkrellm can quantify this), you may want to consider switching the I/O scheduler to CFQ, which does the same thing as task preemption does for the CPU; again, this is only if it's compiled into your kernel, but I/O schedulers can also be modules; either way, you can check what's available by reading the contents of /sys/block/hd?/queue/scheduler, and you can change it by writing one of those values to the same file. The only two worthwhile ones for you are anticipatory and CFQ.