> Doesn't help much.
> The only thing that really helped was the 'kill a bunch of daemons'
> approach. 

Actually I don't run apm daemon, and I add 'noatime' option as well as
softupdate for mounting every file system and also add 'nodevmtime' option
for root file system.  Note that with a 'nodevmtime' option, you cannot
get a useful updated idle time for 'w' nor 'finger'.

You cannot avoid this behavior if you needs access time updated.

Atsushi Onoe