[SOLVED] Choppy performance under load

[asarazan]

Hi, I just upgraded my computer to have a 3000+ AMD64 and Asus A8V-Deluxe, and with the change I decided to put Gentoo on it.

I've had Gentoo64 on my laptop (also an amd64 3000+) for a few months now and everything is running smoothly.

On the desktop however, I notice that when I give the system a task that puts it under heavy load, such as copying files, or even just downloading a patch, it becomes basically unusable. It never did this on the laptop.

For instance, I was trying to copy files over from my windows partition to this partition (on the same physical drive), and it got so bogged down that it took probably a minute or more just to open firefox. Sometimes it would just seem to lock up.

After I decided cp was taking too long, I decided to do the copy via KDE's file manager, and in the readings I noticed that its speed calculations would build up, the thing would lurch into one of its little freezes, and when it came out the rated speed will have gone down dramatically, like it gets going too fast and then can't handle it or something, so it's not like the file transfer is hogging up all the resources, because there's nothing being transferred during the freeze.

Any ideas?


*edit* It did the same thing when I was installing WoW under Point2Play from CDROM, so it's not like I'm putting unreasonable stress on this thing, and like I said, it never did this on the laptop.
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The Seraphim

[asarazan]

Ah, if nothing else, posting on the forums is a foolproof way to ensure that you find the answer on your own sometime within the next 10 minutes. Never fails.

DMA wasn't turned on on the hard disk, even though I had hdparmed it, via82cxxx has to be enabled (not just moduled) in the kernel before it lets you turn on DMA.

Thank god that's overwith.
_________________
The Seraphim