[rub3x]

I just installed gentoo, and I thought it was working fine, but its very slow. When using emerge with no terminal it lags the text on *****x. When in x my load average is VERY high in the 4-5's, and the computer freezes for like 10 seconds at a time. Its something to do wtih transfering large files. When i used ftp to transfer a 2 gig file it went V E R Y slow and toke forever. The comp has an AMD 3200 with a gig of ram so this is definitly a problem. I use ext2 on /dev/hda3

[Monkeh]

You should be using EXT3 or ResierFS these days. Try turning DMA on.

Plus, do you have a swap partition, and is it turned on? cat /proc/meminfo

[rub3x]

The filesystem should not make it lag as bad as its lagging, its locking for like 10 seconds on a 2gb file =S...
rub3x@Force ~ $ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 904592 kB
MemFree: 22592 kB
Buffers: 17076 kB
Cached: 617908 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 456904 kB
Inactive: 387264 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 904592 kB
LowFree: 22592 kB
SwapTotal: 506036 kB
SwapFree: 503476 kB
Dirty: 1688 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 248328 kB
Slab: 31828 kB
CommitLimit: 958332 kB
Committed_AS: 264932 kB
PageTables: 1216 kB
VmallocTotal: 122804 kB
VmallocUsed: 592 kB
VmallocChunk: 122212 kB
rub3x@Force ~ $

[Monkeh]

No, but I'd still recommend using EXT3 or ResierFS over EXT2 any day.

Try turning DMA on:

hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

[rub3x]

I read a thread about that command somewhere else, I get this output when doing it:
Force rub3x # hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)
Force rub3x #

[Monkeh]

What make and model is your drive, and the same for your motherboard (I'm guessing old).

Edit: Also, make sure you have DMA capability in your kernel.

[rub3x]

Not old..Maxtor 140 GB, and a gigabyte k7 triton...No idea about kernel.

EDIT: CONFIG_GENERIC_ISA_DMA=y is in config file if thats what you're looking for?

[Monkeh]

No.

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_PCI=y
CONFIG_IDEDMA_PCI_AUTO=y

[rub3x]

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_PCI=y
CONFIG_IDEDMA_PCI_AUTO=y

My config file ^

[Monkeh]

7NNXP?

Edit: Is your drive SATA?