Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[ahoppin]

I have a full installation of 5.2.5 on a 250gb IDE disk connected to an elderly Promise Ultra 100 controller card. The drive is partitioned into root, swap, and home filesystems.

Once memory (512m) is full and the system starts swapping to disk, it becomes painfully slow. When I have multiple files open in Gimp, it can take the better part of a half-minute to switch from one to another!

I have another IDE drive on the mainboard IDE controller, and a SATA drive for shared data (dual boot with Windows 98) on the mainboard SATA controller.

With a fresh boot, nothing swapped, hdparm -t says throughput on both IDE drives is around 57 mb/sec. (The SATA drive is quite a bit faster, 97 mb/sec.)

However, once any memory has been swapped, according to htop the swap space is never again empty. And when swap space is in use, hdparm tells me that the IDE drive with Puppy on it slows way down, to between 23 and 30 mb/sec. The only way I've found to get the old speed back (such as it is) is to reboot.

If I could add a swap partition on the sata drive, is there a way I could tell Puppy to use that instead of the one on the IDE drive it lives on?

Or would that then slow down the SATA drive?

Short of installing more memory to cut down on swapping, is there anything else I can do to improve this situation?

Thanks for any suggestions you may have.

[L18L]

[ahoppin]

Thanks, I'll try that and see what happens.

I think I've found a clue to what's going on here.

The following was posted ~2 years ago. I hope none of the pupsters here minds a link to a different forum.

http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?/topic/84244-extremely-slow-disk-access-after-2009-1-update/

"After a relatively painless update from Powerpak 2009.0 to 2009.1 ... my second 300G [IDE] drive now has access issues ... The problem seems to be access speed ..."

And an answer:

"... with my Promise Ultra 100 controller I've been waiting for nearly two years and libata has yet to be fixed to use this device properly. There's not much incentive to get this old hardware working in libata, particularly since the device will work fine even in the newer kernels if the kernel is compiled with legacy ide support enabled. When that's the case, ide devices will be designated hdx instead of sdx which indicates that libata is not being used for that device."

My IDE disks (I have another connected to the mainboard port) are indeed designated sd[abc], so it appears that Lucid 5.2.5 is using libata and that it *still* does not support Promise Ultra 100 controllers properly.

I tried booting Wary 5.1.1, which IIRC does have IDE support enabled in the kernel, but it didn't recognize the Promise Ultra 100 controller at all. Tomorrow I'll see if a later Wary version has the drivers to talk to it.

But I'm now thinking that the easy answer is one posted in the forum linked above - a cheap IDE to SATA converter (if there's room for it in the computer case), since the mainboard still has another SATA port free.

Or ... I guess I could just buy another SATA drive, move Lucid to that, and Ebay the 250gb IDE drive to someone who needs it.

More memory would be nice, but I'm not sure it's worth buying it for this older board, and I'd have to patch Win98 to work with it. Might do it if I can find some used memory cheap enough.

Thanks again.

[L18L]

maybe this
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02099
will help ?

[ahoppin]

I found some cheap used memory, and with 2gb, performance is much improved. I'm also overclocking the cpu, up from 2.1 to 2.4g (actual speed).

Lucid does OK now with Gimp at 2gb of memory. Audacity is marginal, but usable for small files. No swapping now, but it's still hitting the wall on cpu cycles. I have no idea what to do about that. This board is about at the max on cpu and memory speed.

I hate to say it, but on this machine, Win98 runs circles around Lucid. It can also handle Photoshop 6.0 and Cool Edit 2.1 just fine.

But let's remember that Win98 is an ancient, unsupported OS with no future. It has no clue what to do with all that extra memory - it's still using only 512m. It has very uneasy relationships with big, modern disk drives. I expect that supported modern proprietary OSes - Win7 or even a default XP - wouldn't be much faster, if any, than Lucid. And at least this way I have a FOSS OS, outstanding security, and no obnoxious MS EULA.

[ahoppin]

Update: I swapped the Promise Ultra 100 card for a SiI 0680 based IDE card. Now have normal speed disc access on the IDE drives.