Very Computer

When X Window starts it show me a background and a mouse and then it will
take around two or three minutes to start. there is no activity in this
time. the same thing happens when i try to run certain programs like
netscape. and certain programs from the control panel. I have a 166 Intel
with 16MB 70ns RAM and a 2.1GB  Fujitsu HDD. Any suggestions?

At approximately Sat, 29 Aug 1998 16:00:25 +1200,
: When X Window starts it show me a background and a mouse and then it will
: take around two or three minutes to start. there is no activity in this
: time. the same thing happens when i try to run certain programs like
: netscape. and certain programs from the control panel. I have a 166 Intel
: with 16MB 70ns RAM and a 2.1GB  Fujitsu HDD. Any suggestions?
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When you mean there's no activity, do you mean no disk activity?  That
sounds suspicious.  If there is disk activity, the waiting period is
known as `swapping', which is not surprising with the amount of RAM you
have in the machine.  You may be able to tune disk performance with the
`hdparm' program to speed up disk accesses.  If you're using the stock
Red Hat window manager setup, disk accesses in general may be another
reason things are slowing down---the stock configuration reads and
processes a *lot* of files.

You might be able to monitor what's going on by switching to another
console while your X session is starting and running the `top' program.
You can see what processes are taking up the CPU time and what's
happening to memory that way.

--jim

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 This may be a silly question, but how big is your swap partition??

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------------ k0rd

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  This is a DNS thing, X uses TCP, I think it goes looking for your machine
and cant find it, then eventually times out. I your box is isolated disable
named else fix your DNS.