http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9263
--- Comment #28 from Stefan Dösinger stefandoesinger@gmx.at 2007-11-24 14:23:27 --- I am running out of ideas now. I know very little outside of the directx code, and I doubt as well that directx causes this problem. I also doubt that your 512 mb of memory are the trouble here. If it was a memory issue then you'd have the harddrive spinning all the time.
One last thing, can you check with process monitors if there is any other process that consumes CPU time?
If you suspect that it is caused by your dual core CPU, you can disable one CPU in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online . This way you can stop the scheduler from using the CPU.
How the file is read depends on the game. If it is clever, then it will just mmap the file and the job is entirely handled by the kernel - Unless this problem here is hit: http://wiki.winehq.org/UnalignedMmap . But in this case, GW wouldn't run with my 2GB of ram either.
Are any of your drives mounted from a network share(Samba or nfs?). Possibly your home directory or /tmp ?
Regarding the categories: http://bugs.winehq.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html#bug_severity In case of games one might argue that 3fps is a big loss of functionality, but all cases where games start up but have very bad performance are rated minor because otherwise we'd run out of categories. A game that doesn't start up at all doesn't qualify as major(loss of functionality across wide range of apps), so it is normal. However, starting up but having terrible performance is still better than not starting at all