Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 06:15:44 -0800 (PST) From: "Scott I. Remick" <scott@sremick.net> To: Ramiro Aceves <ea1abz@wanadoo.es>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Man pages take forever on slow machine? Message-ID: <20041229141544.48982.qmail@web53603.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <41D27B50.70105@wanadoo.es>
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--- Ramiro Aceves <ea1abz@wanadoo.es> wrote: > My pentium 100 MHz with 16 MB RAM runs smoothly with FreeBSD 4.10 , it > even runs fvwm under X. I am not able to run 5.3 install, as I only have > 16MB, I was suspecting that I need more memory for the install proccess. The reason I wanted 5.3 was so that, if my dad gets hooked and wants to progress, he doesn't have to unlearn the 4.x way of things after just learning it. Unfortunately this old system is the only spare one we had lying around. Now, I can understand needing more than 16MB to install. I can understand that there'd be a lot of swapping. I can understand it's going to be a lot slower than what I'm used to. But what I don't understand is how I could wake up this morning and it's STILL working on that man page. That seems to suggest not just proportional slowness, but that there's something horribly wrong. Truth is, even when it was churning, there wasn't a ton of hard drive access, which lead me to believe that it wasn't a RAM/VM/swapping issue. And now I don't even notice the hard drive light flashing. And even if it WAS swapping... I'd expect FreeBSD to multitask enough so that I could log in under another VTTY and run top and vmstat and such to figure out what was going on. Or at least being able to use CTRL-C to abort (which won't work). Maybe people think I'm masochistic here... but I struggle through these things to learn. Yeah I could just say "Sorry, dad... you need to spend $100 and pick up a faster used system" but that'd just turn him off the whole idea and keep it from happening anytime soon, and I wouldn't have learned anything more about FreeBSD. My nose tells me there's something wrong here above and beyond my system just being 1/4th the speed of a 450MHz Pentium or the hard drive being twice as slow... and I'd like to either figured it out so I can fix it, or learn precisely what it is for the future.
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