Arch Linux

metallicalter

Member

Registered: 2025-05-11

Posts: 2

system suddenly drastically slowed down

Hello everyone.
I've been running Arch for about 2 months now, with perfectly good performance. Opening my system today, I noticed a significant impact in performance (boot time, time to open applications, general use, snappiness of the system) (even something as simple as neofetch takes around 3-5 seconds to show all information). htop output seems okay, no severe use of CPU, memory, or my SSD. I'm still really new to the world of Linux, and I'm hoping for answers that are not RTFM, but any inputs are very appreciated.

Note: As I was writing this post, the power to my building went out, and when it came back the performance issue seems to have left. I'm not sure why this is, so if somebody could explain that, it would be really helpful.

System Specs:

Kernel: 6.14.6-arch1-1
DE: Hyprland
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U
Memory: 16GB (I've dedicated 8 to the iGPU)
Storage: 512GB nvme SSD (WDC SN530)

systemd-analyze critical-chain output:

graphical.target @48.146s
└─multi-user.target @48.145s
  └─systemd-user-sessions.service @25.999s +138ms
    └─network.target @25.983s
      └─wpa_supplicant.service @25.747s +231ms
        └─basic.target @22.131s
          └─dbus-broker.service @21.768s +317ms
            └─dbus.socket @21.700s
              └─sysinit.target @21.695s
                └─systemd-update-done.service @21.550s +141ms
                  └─ldconfig.service @17.631s +3.904s
                    └─systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service @16.125s +1.475s
                      └─local-fs.target @16.034s
                        └─boot.mount @14.906s +1.116s
                          └─systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-E7C0\x2d8658.service @14.299s +592ms
                            └─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-E7C0\x2d8658.device @12.802s

Cheers!

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,287

Re: system suddenly drastically slowed down

Locked in low performance mode?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_fr … ng_drivers

watch grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-9]*/cpufreq/scaling_{min,cur,max}_freq

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metallicalter

Member

Registered: 2025-05-11

Posts: 2

Re: system suddenly drastically slowed down

Locked in low performance mode?

using the amd_pstate driver for performance mode. the power outage seems to have completely solved the problem altogether.

systemd-analyze critical-chain after reboot, after the outage:

graphical.target @3.092s
└─sddm.service @3.092s
  └─systemd-user-sessions.service @3.081s +8ms
    └─network.target @3.080s
      └─wpa_supplicant.service @3.056s +23ms
        └─basic.target @1.804s
          └─dbus-broker.service @1.763s +39ms
            └─dbus.socket @1.760s
              └─sysinit.target @1.759s
                └─systemd-update-done.service @1.741s +18ms
                  └─ldconfig.service @1.529s +209ms
                    └─systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service @1.456s +72ms
                      └─local-fs.target @1.454s
                        └─boot.mount @1.411s +41ms
                          └─systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-E7C0\x2d8658.service @742ms +43ms
                            └─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-E7C0\x2d8658.device @728ms

the only things I've done are disable tor.service and uninstall LibreOffice. For knowledge sake, I'd still like to know what fixed it.

Cheers!

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,287

Re: system suddenly drastically slowed down

As I was writing this post, the power to my building went out, and when it came back the performance issue seems to have left.

If the issue is no longer present nor recurring and such outages are "normal" (get a UPS or a notebook w/ a battery…?) the hard reset might have easily "fixed" the bogus HW state.

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