I have a PC with dual PIII/500MHz + 512MB ram and
enough hard disk space. Skype is running in this PC
under SuSE Linux 9.1. I had originally some problems
with sound but it works ok now.

Currently only one problem remains. Probably due my
own firewall between this WS and Internet. The symptoms
are as follows:
- 1: constant disk "rattle" when skype is "online" or starting
- 2: startup takes quite long, about a minute or so, I think
system launches big java applications faster, so this might
related to the first

I suspect it is some kind of logging or polling issue but I have
yet not traced where that ends in but there does not seem
to be anything in the /var/log, nor in the stuff reported by dmesg.
Directories /var and /tmp do not seem to be growing...

System response time is not that bad, and "top" is showing
a lot of idle time

I tried browsing the forum a few pages but did not find anything
like this - it might be FAQ anyway...

any idea?

regards,

timo

Do you know if the disk "rattle" is for writing or reading?
Maybe your system is spread over multiple partitions, so you can get very useful results observing your disk/partition statistics with a tool like gkrellm. (With gkrellm you get realtime statistics about activity on your machine... cpu usage, parocess launch, disk/net activity, memory usage and much more)

Look also at running application, especially at skype with lsof... a check of your rights on skype's profile (~/.Skype) might be useful too.

I think it is related to network and skype connecting to the central(?) servers. Disk rattle starts when I start skype, goes on until it creates
its login screen, and stays off while it is waiting for login credentials. After I have given the user name and password, it connects(?) to
the server(?) and the rattle starts again and goes on until (skype is) closed.

Second choice is that it is both network and screen/gui related. If I have several desktops under KDE and switch back to skype
desktop I get the sound until the skype screen is repainted. Odd.
Both disk io andd eth0 get a peak, according to "gkrellm" you suggested to check with.

Should I rather run skype under GNOME desktop? That should not matter but might have some effect, I will give it a try.

Another thing is that the sound quality at the other end is not that good - meaning my voice is distorted at the other party I am talking
with. Could this come from the fact that I am using OSS? I did not get it working with ALSA originally but I am going to give it another
try. There was a good article about that in the forum. Seemed to need some more tweaking...

When I log in I get the rattle back...

Oh, well... should have tried ethereal the first time:-)
There seems to be a lot of TCP traffic: NFS, portmap and sunrpc...
Could it be polling a file? I wonder why it is the workstation that does the rattle, home directory comes from a server.

OK, I try to move ~/.Skype behind a link on local drive...
AND Guess What! The rattle is gone. So a disk file polling issue?
Proabably! In my case it might come from the fact that I do not
yet have NTP running here, so the workstation has sometimes
different clock as compared to the server. Maybe?

OK, thanks for your reply Bonbons, pointed me towards the
right one - although I should have checked with the ethereal
as first thing anyway.

Still have to check the sound thing on SuSE9.1, OSS vs ALSA
and all the modules tweaking mentioned in the article.
I wish myself luck...

Thanks!

Timo

At startup, Skype "talks" to the config files in $HOME/.Skype a lot, to initialize its network stuff. If the directory is on another machine, it is obviously done over the network as well, and this is most likely responsible for all the activity.

Is your NFS configured correctly, and all required daemons running? I had some troubles with lockd not running (early versions of skype could not connect because of that!, but don't know how it's about newer ones...)
The result of lockd not running was failure to lock files... and that made many Gnome apps Segment-fault on my System! KDE did not notice it!

Out of topic: I am not a Linux user ... all chinese for me ...

Hello Timotero (what does the "tero" mean?), happy to see you on the forum ... but I had to search for your post through Bonbons username!

:wink: