[Assist] Really bad disk I/O or CPU time sharing.

[Guilherme Vieira]

Hi, all. I've had the same problem on two different laptops in which I've
installed Parabola, and I've had the same problem using gNewSense, IIRC.

Basically disk access gets impaired very easily. I just did a system update
right now and while the packages were being installed, my music player kept
skipping. I'm not sure if that's caused by a buffer underrun due to bad
disk I/O, or if it's having trouble decoding due to high CPU load.

Since the computer doesn't feel slow at times like this, and just seems to
"skip a beat" every now and then (quite noticeably,) I'm much more inclined
to think it's an I/O problem.

None of this ever happened on Windows using these two laptop computers.
Also when Xorg or sometimes Firefox crashes, *the whole* system gets
hogged, in such a way that I can't switch to or use the TTYs (if I manage
to switch to them) and the computer doesn't respond to the physical power
off button (ACPI request stuck on X...?)

Please let me know if anyone knows how to troubleshoot these kinds of
issues.

A friend of mine mentioned ulimit (max open files by user,) which in my
computer is set to 1024 (soft) / 4096 (hard,) even though the system-wide
configuration is set to 300k+. Should I raise the maximum number of open
files for my user or should I lower the system-wide number? Are they too
high or too low? Could they be causing these issues?

TIA.

Atenciosamente / Sincerely,
Guilherme Prá Vieira
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/n2liquid>
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