Inconsistent responsiveness, poor with menus and shell completion

Tom Bombadil · 2013-11-25 03:28:17

Edit: I received a hard drive failure warning not too long after making this thread. The problems were resolved after replacing the HDD.

I'm having a few performance-related issues. Any suggestions, experiences, and/or external information sources would be greatly appreciated.
Suggestions on how to troubleshoot this sort of thing in general would be great as well.

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but it seemed most likely. I do have the same problems with FreeBSD and other Linux distributions though.

Problem: I have Arch installed on my HP Pavilion dv6 "entertainment" laptop, which works pretty well with Windows, but other operating systems (mostly Arch experience) perform inconsistently. Most problems revolve around slow response times. Performance monitors like htop do not show any obvious resource issues, and usage is often pretty low. Context menus, launcher menus, tabs, and similar features will sometimes take over 5 seconds to open or navigate to sub-menus, regardless of window manager or desktop environment. These times were pretty consistent between default LXDE and KDE with full compositing. Both bash-completion and zsh's completion seem pretty slow as well. Both can take a few seconds to perform small completions, such as with cd. I only started wondering about this after being outperformed by old school computers and a Raspberry Pi. The last straw for me was when I installed Arch with XFCE and Mint with KDE as guests in VirtualBox within Windows 7, and they both work perfectly, sitting open alongside normal Windows use.

Actually, live-cds of Linux distributions work great, but I'm not sure if that is because using only RAM is an overkill workaround, or there's another coinciding difference.

I've tried to troubleshoot the problem before, but never got arrived at a clear, definite answer. A few things I thought had potential issues:

- BIOS issues. This would explain why VirtualBox in Windows worked so well, unless whatever was causing the issue is actually being replaced by a Windows component.
- Disk speed issues would explain slow navigation of hdd storage content.
- CPU frequency settings. I have heard that the BIOS will limit this to a safe minimum if it does not recognize the usage as being safe. I've also heard that in Arch, getting the CPU information to display correctly is a common issue.
- Video card issue (?). I don't know much about how, where, and when video cards work, but in both Windows 7 and Linux, 3d accelerated games work incredibly well, but despite otherwise amazing frame rates, video will often freeze at a frame for a moment every several seconds (during which the AMD GPU will stop its quiet buzzing/humming), with stuttering sound-looping. I think this problem is probably irrelevant here, but if it is a factor to normal usage issues that only manifest in Linux, that would still point in the right direction.
- Multiple memory modules. The laptop has two, and I've heard that in rare cases this can be an issue.

A little info about the laptop. If I can provide anything more useful, please say so.

HP Pavilion dv6-6153cl It seems to have been designed around Windows 7, given the 2 year old HP-modified drivers and patches to Windows 7 specific to the notebook model series. A trial of Windows 8 had some driver issues, mainly with video.

2GHz Core i7-2630QM
"Hybrid Graphics" - I usually use Intel alone for both Linux and Windows.
AMD Radeon HD 6770M
Intel HD Graphics 3000
8GB DDR3 RAM

Any insight would be helpful, and I would love to know how to diagnose problems like this on my own. I've had little luck learning how with Google.

Last edited by Tom Bombadil (2015-12-07 04:30:07)

cfr · 2013-11-25 03:59:17

Does Linux recognise the RAM?

What cpu frequency information have you got and why do you think it is inaccurate?

How are you managing the hybrid graphics in Linux? You say you mostly use intel only but you earlier talk about the amd performance? Which drivers?

What do the logs/journal say?

Unlikely to affect only Linux, but have you checked the RAM with memtest? Have you checked the disk with smartctl?

Arch Linux

#1 2013-11-25 03:28:17

Inconsistent responsiveness, poor with menus and shell completion

#2 2013-11-25 03:59:17

Re: Inconsistent responsiveness, poor with menus and shell completion

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