On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 13:40 -0500, Steffen Persvold wrote: > What is the purpose of the "haldaemon" and why is it destroying my > system performance ? > hal polls for media change on your optical drive; is your optical drive /dev/hdb by any chance? E.g. on the same cable as /dev/hda - I've had reports yesterday about hdparm giving bad numbers in this case. Basically hal does this (every two seconds) open("/dev/hdc", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE) = 0 ioctl(0, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = 1 close(0) Can some kernel person comment on why this is killing performance on the /dev/hda harddrive when the optical drive at /dev/hdb is polled? Cheers, David