I had the same problem , my responsiveness was crap...until I enabled dma.  my hd performance was so much better after I enabled it.  Also, if you want dma to be enabled when you start your computer add this line to your /etc/conf.d/local.start file:  "/sbin/hdparm -qc1 -qd1 -qm16 -qk1 -qu1 /dev/hda" without quotes.  you can do a man hdparm to find out what each flag does, but I have found that this gies me the best performance.  Also, the "q" before each flag tells it to do that in quiet mode, which means it won't spit anything out on the screen when you boot up.  Good luck

Ben


On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 18:57, Bob Phan wrote:

* [Apr 28, 2003] Canek Pel?ez Vald?s <canek <at> abulafia.fciencias.unam.mx>: > Hi; I'm a happy new Gentoo user for like a month now. Everything works > like a charm (both in my desktop and laptop machines), and I just > finished my weekley `emerge --update --deep world'. > > However, I've a little annoying problem; when my disk is heavily used > (untarring a very big file, or copying a lot of files, and even > compiling large programs), X becomes _very_ unresponsive. Even the > mouse cursor makes "jumps" when moving from one point in the screen to > another. I had this exact problem before. This has much to do with the fact that other distros enable DMA and put harddrive optimizations in for you. With gentoo, you're going to have to do this yourself. Type this as root: # hdparm /dev/hda (or whatever harddrive you have linux on) My output looks like this: /dev/hda: multcount = 16 (on) IO_support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 1 (on) using_dma = 1 (on) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 8 (on) geometry = 14593/255/63, sectors = 234441648, start = 0 The important one to look at is the 'using_dma' one. If that is not on, then it explains your problem. You can set this by issuing this command: # hdparm -d1 /dev/hda You can check the performance difference by issuing this command before and after you make that modification. # hdparm -Tt /dev/hda Hope this helps.