# Why is My System Running So Slow?

## bode

I decided to switch to Gentoo after using FreeBSD for about a year, because I wanted more software and hardware support. I was hoping for an extremely fast system when I installed Gentoo because of its reputation, but unfortunately the speed isn't even close to what FreeBSD was on my machine. 

Whenever I try to do anything with my drives, the system nearly grinds to a halt. The application loading is at least twice as slow. Compiling software isn't too slow, it's what I would expect except that my mp3 player skips a lot. The worst is when I copy data from a CD to my hard drive. It takes really long, and periodically will make my mouse very very skippy, my mp3 will skip horribly, and will even make X stop responding.  With Grip in FreeBSD I would usually have around 15x rips, but on Gentoo I am getting 4x tops.

So why is my system so incredibly slow? Got any tips to boost speed? I compiled "Enable DMA by default" and "Preemptible kernel" into my kernel (I am using gentoo-sources) FYI. I'd appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.

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## bsolar

Is your DMA actually working? Check with hdparm.

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## snkmoorthy

I had a problem with intel IDE chipset with gentoo-sources-2.4.10-r10 even with the correct kernel compilation. I then switched to vanilla-sources and am back to gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r1(r2) with no problems, its a laptop and it gives and these numbers buffer reads - 350Mb/s and disk reads 21 Mb/s - give or take +/- 10%

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## bode

 *bsolar wrote:*   

> Is your DMA actually working? Check with hdparm.

 

I checked if DMA was turned on with hdparm, found the hard drive performance thread and got my hard drive up to speed. Things seem to be loading a little more quickly. Thanks for that tip.

Unfortunately my CD ripping in Grip still slows down my system greatly. I  tried ripping another CD. My mouse and mp3 player skipped around like crazy. With FreeBSD, that kind of slow down never happened. I still only get 4x rips max and I know my computer is capable of up to 15x. Does anyone know why my ripping could slow down my computer so much? What kind of things can I do to get things working at a decent speed? Thanks.

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## weltraumfahrer

Hi,

> Unfortunately my CD ripping in Grip still slows down my system greatly.

For faster ripping, Configuration -> Rip -> Ripper and disable the Extra-Paranoia stuff.

For the slow down, start grip with nice.

Frank

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## modal

also, there is a patch available CDDA-DMA i think is what it is called, for 2.4.x kernels (it is currently available in gaming-sources and lolo-sources, i think also in ck as well)

That fixes the slow cd rip speeds.

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