On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 05:51:49PM +0100, Chris G wrote:
I have an odd situation here, after a recent reboot my system seemed *very* slow indeed, took ages to start the X desktop etc. and when I looked at the load average with 'uptime' it was over 5 which is pretty silly considering there is really nothing much happening.
While the X desktop was still thinking about appearing I ran a virtual console, logged in (even that was a bit slow) and ran tops. Tops reported virtually nothing consuming processor time.
So what's going on, why is my system slow, especially when starting, but nothing actually seems to be doing much.
This is a Core 2 Duo Quad core processor with 8Gb of memory so really should be quite quick - especially when doing nothing!
Running uptime now (40 minutes after power-up) the load average is 0.03 which is more like what I'd expect to see?
Is there any way to see what that load average is indicating?
After a couple of reboots (just as slow) it expired completely with a message about some mount entries in /etc/fstab failing. After a short panic I've managed to get things working again and, among other things, have run smartctl on my disks - nothing amiss as far as it can tell and fsck shows no errors either.
It's almost as if the system is *so* slow and overloaded at boot time that the mounts are failing. It's also complaining about the following USB entry in fstab:-
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=123,devmode=666 0 0
I've commented it out for the moment and things seem to be running a little smoother. What does it do? .... ah, it's something to do with USB in VirtualBox, I'll leave it commented out for the moment until I've sorted out my other problems.