New Debian Squeeze is slow.

[Konan]

I have been running a Shuttle (AMD 64/3000) with Debian Etch just fine for - well, as long as Etch has been out. Worked fine. I finally decided to install Squeeze and did so from scratch, starting with a blank HD. Etch also works fine, except that it crawls. The cursor drags, I can type ahead of the system when entering a URL, a simple perl script with an access to a Sqlite DB and writing a few hundred bytes to a few tables can take over a minute with the HD access going berserk - reminds me of Dos days with no buffers and accessing one sector at a time.

I dumped the install, reformatted and started over. This time selecting nothing on the base install. After a good install and reboot, I apt-got an absolute minimum of software - i.e. only Xfce and Gedit. Same problem.

Despite looking all through the system, I am not seeing the problem. It is probably a forest and tree thing that I am overlooking. Another example of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Another problem is that my Linux box has been working for so long and so well, that my old down and dirty troubleshooting skills are going away.

Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks.
Konan

[Konan]

Let me fix a major typo.
Where it said, Etch also works fine, except that it crawls.
I really meant, Squeeze also works fine, except that it crawls.

[camelrider]

A) Is the system able to see all your RAM?
B) Is there an issue with your video driver?

Just off the top of my head...

[Konan]

Yes to the first. HTOP reports that only about a third of the 2gb is used at any time and swap is never touched. This is really a minimum load of Squeeze at the moment, with everything unneeded turned off.

As to video, if I bring it up in just console mode, my scripts crawl just as in terminal under XFCE. It looks just like the old problem of Red Hat 9 default install ages ago, where you had to set an hdparm command to something, or the disk accesses were one sector at a time.

I think it has to do with the hard drive subsystem, since I can hear the normally quiet hd jigsawing the head any time a disk access is required.

As a test to make sure something hasn't gone south on my machine, I booted a Knoppix disk to try the same scripts. They run normally, and my test one finishes in about three seconds, as opposed to two or three minutes under Squeeze.

But... With Squeeze running under Parallels on OSX, it runs normally also. So something in both my Shuttle and in Squeeze don't like each other.