[lug] It slows down

[J. Wayde Allen]

I've seen this kind of behaviour before.  My old NIST machine (a Micron
system) had this tendency.  As far as I was ever able to figure out it
seemed to be hardware related.  Basically, Linux would run fine, just 
v...e...r...y  s...l...o...w...l...y sometimes.  In my case, you knew
that you'd hit this condition if it took a long time for the system to
boot.  As you've noted a warm boot usually fixed the problem.  I never
could find any rogue processes slowing things down.

My best guess was that this had something to do with the software
configurable bios.  Since I no longer have that box I don't remember the
details, but I seem to remember a message about bios settings somehow
being out of sync after the prior shutdown.  I never did quite
understand what all was going on, but always got the feeling the new bios
was designed to interact with MSWindows somehow, and that Linux didn't
support this.  Sorry, lots of speculation here on my part.

The other time I've seen slow operation is if the network card doesn't
auto-initialize correctly.  In that case the system can sit there trying
to get a network connection, and that can make things pretty slow.  Either
hard configuring the card or rebooting usually fixes that.

No particularly good answers, but thought you might like to know that you
are not alone.

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)