blee2@tampabay.rr.com wrote:
> Thus Paul M Foster hast written on Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 04:49:12PM -0500, and, according to prophecy, it shall come to pass that:
> <snip><snip><snip>
>> I'm losing up to 10 minutes per hour on this box. And that certainly
>> doesn't make sense.
>
> YIKES! That is crazy!
>
> There was an article on the US Naval Observatory's website that talked
> about how computers with GUI's are really bad for keeping accurate time.
> Whenever there is a mouse move, click, keypress, network access, etc, it
> causes an interrupt. The interrupt preempts processes, including
> updates of the Real Time Clock.
>
> Your numbers would be 10 seconds every minute, which is a sixth (1/6)
> of a second lost every second. Anyhow, it's crazy.
>
> With the poor performance you mentioned, I think there may be something
> else wrong with the system. When you run "top", is there one process
> that stays at the top and uses 99% of CPU? (Maybe a distributed.net or
> seti@home client?) Are your CPU and MoBo clock speed set correctly?
> Are your CPU and case fan spinning? (The CPU fan on my AMD-K6-2 sometimes
> stops on reboot and halves processor speed once it heats up.)
>
> Any chance you have a different processor you could put in, or a
> different case you could move the drive to, just to see if performance
> improves?
>
Oh, I *know* there's something wrong with the machine. Screen savers
move in jumps, performance on everything is way slower than this
CPU/memory combination should warrant.
No, there's no one process sucking CPU. I checked long ago on this. In
fact, back when I checked (and the time sucked then, too), my wife was
barely using the machine. She ran blackbox (very thin window manager),
Thunderbird, and maybe a game like shisen-sho. Now she's using it more,
and the performance is worse. I put a second fan in that case, just
because it seemed like the air coming out was too hot to me. Fans all
spin. I wouldn't rule out a mismatch on the CPU and memory timings, but
I don't even know what they *should* be or how to change them.
Unfortunately, only a Sempron CPU will fit the board, and I don't have a
spare.
Paul
-- Paul M. Foster ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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