[ltp] programs take much too long to start

[Joel Ebel]

I had a problem similar to this.  It could be completely different, but 
I'd recommend checking it out at least.  My problem was that while my 
hard drive worked, it was exceptionally slow reading a large percentage 
of sectors.  I never got the hard drive to fail the Hitachi drive 
fitness test, so I had a hard time getting IBM to replace it, but they 
finally did.  The problem was evident when I ran the system speed test. 
  I ran it off the ultimate boot cd, but you can download it by itself 
and run it from a DOS floppy.  Here are the results from my full hard 
drive test:

http://moses.sca.ncsu.edu/~jbebel/scratch/FULLTEST.bmp

You can see where the read speed is supposed to be, and you can see how 
awful my drive was in some places.  My replacement drive is nice and 
smooth where you would expect it to be.

This could be something entirely different from your problem, but 
finding this and getting a new hard drive made me feel like I had a 
brand new laptop.  I'd been operating with a terrible hard drive for 
quite some time.

Of course, I also recommend periodically running the full Hitachi drive 
fitness test.  And memtest.  It's good to give you hardware a checkup 
every now and then.  I found an intermittent RAM error in one of my 
memtests too.  It never noticeably affected me, but when the RAM got 
hot, it would cause some errors.  I got IBM to replace that too after a 
bit of an argument.  They really like their PC Doctor Diagnostics.  But 
I've had three problems that PC Doctor Diagnostics was incapable of 
detecting.

Good luck
Joel

Chris Meidinger wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> maybe you got an idea:
>>  
>>
> maybe
> 
>> Sometimes almost all programs on my Thinkpad R51 take much too long to 
>> start. That is for instance about 20s for starting vi. After this long 
>> time the programs operate just as normal.
>>  
>>
> How do you mean start? What is the hard drive doing in this time? Is it 
> reading like crazy, or just short regular bursts?
> 
>> This happens both for root and my user. Normally the problem is gone, 
>> if I just do a reboot. Strace doesn't tell something useful to me. If 
>> I start vi on the "real" console (ctrl+alt+f1), it works normally.
>>
>>  
>>
> The best i can suggest is to check the wait time in top. Wait time is 
> programs that are waiting for disk access.
> If wait time is high, that's your bottleneck.
> 
> Anyway, disk I/O is the first thing that comes to mind. How bad is the 
> disk usage when this happens?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris