[PLUG] X "pauses", kernel questions

[Aaron Burt]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Brent Rieck wrote:

> Hello,
>    Ever since I "upgraded" to RH9 I've been experiencing huge
> multi-second pauses whenever a process has to "get going" after a period
> of inactivity.  It's particularly bad when getting started up in the
> mornings after being idle all night, sometimes it takes 30 seconds for
> xlock to unlock and show the desktop.  I don't have a real screamer of a
> machine, but it's no slowpoke either (Athlon XP 1700, 512MB ram).

Can you tell what the computer's doing during the pauses?  Is the hard
disk spinning up or is it thrashing about?

I understand that the 2.4.10+ series is more "swappy" than others, but I
thought RH hacked a bit on that for their distro kernel.