Very, Very Slow Performance

[JohnConnolly]

We have a very severe performance problem with one of our PC's (Dell 450MHz with 512MB). It can take many minutes to open an application that opens in less than a second on an identical machine. If I stick my ear to the case it sounds like the disk (IDE) is seeking like crazy. If I listen to the "normal" machine I just hear a few clicks. The strange thing is that if I time file copies I see no difference between the two machines. Any thoughts?

 

[TSSTechie]

Hi

You could try scandisk and defrag.

Hope this helps

May The Force Be With You

 

[ceh4702]

I had a damaged hard drive with many bad clusters and it took like 3 hours to run fdisk and then format to fix all the clusters. However, it eventually worked. The hard drive was damaged because the power supply was bad and it repeatedly rebooted.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[cdogg]

John,
If you can do some serious testing, I would first swap the drive into another identical PC.

Same problem? If so, do as much as you can to clean Windows. There are a lot of suggestions in the FAQ section of the Win95/98 forum. Also, download Ad-Aware and Spybot which will help get rid of network related crap that you don't want. You may be forced with formatting/reinstalling the OS and apps to ensure a clean environment.

Still happening? Probably time to replace the hard drive or risk a crash sometime soon. Feel fortunate that your drive gave you warning.




~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[JohnConnolly]

Thanks for the various replies. I forgot to mention we run a very unusual unix OS - Nextstep / Openstep. Anyway, I've now done some more tests. First was to copy 295MB of image files from our Linux NFS server over a 10Mb/s LAN which took 372" elapsed time, about the same as on the other, identical machine. Then I copied those files from/to the local disk and that took 1364" elapsed time! So it looks like we have normal performance when writing and terrible performance reading. I've tried running fsck to clean up the file system but it had no effect (it took hours to run!).

 

[par60056]

Which version of NeXTStep are you running?

Is there plenty of free space on the swap partitions? You may be seeing 1 machine thrashing to open temp space while the other has plenty to make contiguous files.

I have another question for you as a fellow NeXTStep user that I would like to take off forum. If you don't mind, drop me a note pwspamnot@attbi.com

Peter Richardson

 

[JohnConnolly]

Hi Peter, Nextstep 3.3 but the problem's now fixed - very strange disk failure that didn't give read errors - we could always read the data but it took ages to get it! I found a diagnostic program for the disk and ran that. The read test ran and ran for hours so in the end we threw the disk in the bin and put in a new one.

 

[Sarpedon]

And I'd bet it was a Maxtor too, wasn't it?

After reading your story, I'd have put a $100 down on betting it was a Maxtor.

No offense to Maxtor, I still buy them, but it's spooky how I keep seeing these slow-read problems on them as they go out.

 

[JohnConnolly]

I don't remember the make - it went straight in the bin. Was wierd though - never gave any errors and the data was good once we got it!