[ltp] programs take much too long to start

[Chris Meidinger]

>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