Dolphin painfully slow opening - second round.

[oshunluvr]

Ok, I think I've solved this one. Turned out to be hardware related. My mobo is going on six years old and seems to be slowly dying. The symptoms are: About three months ago my network connection died. I saw right away my switch had gone off line and unplugging one of the desktop NIC's allowed it to come back on. So I figured it had died so I'd just use the one remaining. This time, I was on the network fine for awhile, then it would lag tremendously or drop off. Odd thing was the browser would still work, but Dolphin and Amarok would not. I assumed it was either a mounted filesystem corruption (btrfs) or one of my NFS mounts. I worry about the btrfs because it's still experimental so I checked it first. Then I disconnected the NFS shares and the problem went away. I reviewed my mounts and was still working on the solution when I noticed my laptop was going on-and-off line while hard-wired. I went to my switch and it was flashing on and off. I removed my last desktop NIC from the switch and all went back to normal.

I thought I was stuck with no network until I replaced my desktop, when I had an idea: What if the router could handle whatever the was causing the switch to barf? I figured the router being "smart" and the switch not might make a difference. Luckily, the router and the switch are near enough that no major surgery was required to test this idea. I needed only clip a couple of zip ties and plug in.

Shazam! Both NIC's went into full function mode and the network stayed up. I needed only reset my MTU to normal (switch supports Jumbo Frames, router does not). So I re-configured my port aggregation and am once again re-connected to my server and the 'net. I still think the old mobo is on it's way out, but I'd like to get at least another six months out of her. When I do upgrade, it will be a full architecture change so it'll be pricey.

Thanks, everyone for your ideas and suggestions.

[SteveRiley]

When I do upgrade, it will be a full architecture change so it'll be pricey.

Surely you can find an AS/400 on the cheap somewhere on Craigslist. Matter of fact, I know a guy who heats his basement with one.

[GreyGeek]

Surely you can find an AS/400 on the cheap somewhere on Craigslist. Matter of fact, I know a guy who heats his basement with one.

One of my clients on the outskirts of Omaha had an AS400 with two harddrives and two hd controllers. One for working and one for backup. I was doing VB work on one of their truck GPS apps, but that system was used for payroll. I came to the office one day and the place was in an uproar. The working HD had crashed. So had the backup. Turns out that the vendor had sold them a bill of goods about redundancy and reliability. BOTH HD controllers were powered by a single power supply, and THAT is what burned out. That day, Thursday, was the day they would have printed the paychecks. Needless to say, the paychecks didn't get printed. They didn't get printed the next Thursday, either. The power supply replacement didn't work, but the next one did. Then they found out that the crash had corrupted both drives. They had to go back to a quarterly printout and re-enter data to the current time frame to fill in data they couldn't scrape off of the drives. Meanwhile, they typed out paychecks for everyone so folks could pay bills and eat. My work was finished a short time later, but not before I heard that they had sued their vendor. I didn't follow that fiasco so I can't report who won the lawsuit. That was in the mid 1990s. The trucking company is still in business.