Slowdown, music cuts in and out, cursor locks up while untar

eisforian · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 11 Location: Boston, MA

Any ideas what would cause my machine to become unusable for the period of time following a large `tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz'? `emerge' also tends to lock up my system temporarily. XMMS cuts in and out and the cursor locks up. I'm wondering if it's a kernel thing -- I'm running an Athlon 2400+ at 2 GHz and slowness shouldn't be a problem.

ben_h · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2003 2:03 am Post subject:

You probably don't have DMA enabled for your disks. do a

dmesg | grep hd

and look for some lines in the form

hda: 120103200 sectors (61493 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=119150/16/63, UDMA(33)

hda for me is running at DMA33. If yours aren't, that's the problem.

sessionID · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2003 6:24 am Post subject:

hdparm -d /dev/hd? will show if dma is enabled.
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda will turn it on.
I have this in my /etc/conf.d/local.start BTW.

eisforian · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 11 Location: Boston, MA

Thanks a lot, guys! Seems to have worked.