Micro-freezes during gaming (on disk access?)

[Lockheed]

When I run exquake (OpenGL) every few seconds I get micro-freezes, usually while there is some new sound about to be played or some new model loaded. This of course does not occur when under Windows.

I am using Nvidia drivers.
This is my partition structure: http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/7804/image1wj.png
/opt/quake is a link from root partition to folder on /dev/sda1
I have noatime set for all ext partitions

How can I find out the source of the issue?

[atreyu]

i have no idea what it is, but...if you do suspect it is related to hard drive access (I assume you have spinning disk, not SSD), you can try running it in RAM (if you have enough).

create a tmpfs filesystem. you don't have to specify a size - the kernel will allocate it dynamically, but you can, e.g.:

mkdir /ramdisk
mount -t tmpfs -o size=1g tmpfs /ramdisk

then copy your quake stuff there:

mkdir /ramdisk/quake/
cp -a /opt/quake/* /ramdisk/quake/

then run it and see what happens. if it is good, then you know it is hard drive related.

if not...maybe video graphics issues? are you only experiencing it on network games, or local/solo mode as well?

ps - watch out for quake bunnies!