Man pages take forever on slow machine?

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 06:15:44AM -0800, Scott I. Remick wrote:
> 
> --- Ramiro Aceves <ea1abz at wanadoo.es> wrote:
> 
> > My pentium 100 MHz with 16 MB RAM runs smoothly with FreeBSD 4.10 , it 
> > even runs fvwm under X. I am not able to run 5.3 install, as I only have 
> > 16MB, I was suspecting that I need more memory for the install proccess. 
> 
> The reason I wanted 5.3 was so that, if my dad gets hooked and wants to
> progress, he doesn't have to unlearn the 4.x way of things after just
> learning it. Unfortunately this old system is the only spare one we had
> lying around.
> 
> Now, I can understand needing more than 16MB to install. I can understand
> that there'd be a lot of swapping. I can understand it's going to be a lot
> slower than what I'm used to. But what I don't understand is how I could
> wake up this morning and it's STILL working on that man page. That seems to
> suggest not just proportional slowness, but that there's something horribly
> wrong.
> 
> Truth is, even when it was churning, there wasn't a ton of hard drive
> access, which lead me to believe that it wasn't a RAM/VM/swapping issue. And
> now I don't even notice the hard drive light flashing. And even if it WAS
> swapping... I'd expect FreeBSD to multitask enough so that I could log in
> under another VTTY and run top and vmstat and such to figure out what was
> going on. Or at least being able to use CTRL-C to abort (which won't work).

It sounds like your system has somehow gotten wedged, and won't get out
of that state on its own.  It does not sound like it is merely being
slow - if it was you should indeed be able to switch to another VTTY or
use CTRL-C to stop the offending process.

My first guess would be some kind of hardware problem.
My second guess would be that you have come across some nasty bug in
the kernel.

> 
> Maybe people think I'm masochistic here... but I struggle through these
> things to learn. Yeah I could just say "Sorry, dad... you need to spend $100
> and pick up a faster used system" but that'd just turn him off the whole
> idea and keep it from happening anytime soon, and I wouldn't have learned
> anything more about FreeBSD. My nose tells me there's something wrong here
> above and beyond my system just being 1/4th the speed of a 450MHz Pentium or
> the hard drive being twice as slow... and I'd like to either figured it out
> so I can fix it, or learn precisely what it is for the future.

-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se