I didn't notice it at first. The machines (there is 20 plus) are to be used a simple file servers. It wasn't until samba just wouldn't act right that I installed a desktop gui and started more diagnoseing the problem did I catch the slow preformance... I've tested 4 servers they all suck. And windows 7 runs fantastic on them. I have Google and searched. But nothing to explain this.
The easy test is dmesg is so slow you can almost read it.
I'm guessing it's an apic or cpu power management issue.
What output would you all like?????
It is a core2 machine with 4Gb of ram. On board data.
91 Answer
Some years ago we had a machine that did the same thing. It was as if it ran at a tenth of it's actual clock speed. When we used the recovery kernel it was nice and fast, but it only recognised 1GB of memory. After compiling many many kernels and trying all sorts of things we eventually struck on the real problem: There is a bug in some intel chipsets where a piece of very slow memory right at the top isn't correctly mapped, and of course this is where the kernel is loaded, so the slowness was because the kernel was loaded into very slow ram.
The fix was to pass the mem= boot parameter and sacrifice a 100MB or RAM right at the top. This was also why the recovery kernel worked so well, it loaded the kernel below 1GB instead and avoided this block of memory.
