Anyone else getting crappy performance lately?

Gullible Jones · 2008-12-16 03:46:41

Does anyone else's system feel a little... sluggish... with the latest kernel? Menus taking longer to open, applications longer to start, hard drive grinding more, even with vm.swappiness set to something low?

xxxspuddy · 2008-12-16 11:36:29

I had noticed something similar. In my case it was some unkillable imap processes eating 100% cpu, reverting to an earlier revision of the 2.6.27 kernel seems to have fixed it. I found this on my travels:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/l … el/1008797

HTH

patroclo7 · 2008-12-16 12:03:30

Nice to know that there is already a patch, the issue was highly annoying. I have fixed it temporaneously recompiling dovecot with --with-notify=dnotify, as suggested in the dovecot ML.

Gullible Jones · 2008-12-16 13:51:30

I'm not seeing any unkillable processes... Memory usage in XFCE is about 50% higher than it should be though.

dav7 · 2008-12-16 15:30:20

I'm sure this PC, old as it is, used to feel faster than it does now.

And I also don't think X used to eat 250MB as soon as it started up.

-dav7

Onyros · 2008-12-16 15:56:45

250MB? You must have something wrong there, mate

I boot to 68MB of RAM used, so I can't even imagine X using that much memory.

mentallaxative · 2008-12-16 17:15:26

When I am testing kernels I look at the benchmarks section of the hardinfo program to see if performance has changed. Maybe you can try that.

luciferin · 2008-12-16 18:12:15

Both of my Gnome systems are using > 500 MB on startup.. I'm pretty sure it used to be in the area of 200-300 MB on startup... I can't track down what is using all of that memory though..

Hrod beraht · 2008-12-16 18:38:47

luciferin wrote:

Both of my Gnome systems are using > 500 MB on startup.. I'm pretty sure it used to be in the area of 200-300 MB on startup... I can't track down what is using all of that memory though..

Are you counting the cache?
Mine is using 496 MB, but if I subtract out the cache it's only 112.

Bob

phrakture · 2008-12-16 18:56:37

Gullible Jones wrote:

Does anyone else's system feel a little... sluggish... with the latest kernel? Menus taking longer to open, applications longer to start, hard drive grinding more, even with vm.swappiness set to something low?

You sure it's the kernel and not the new Xorg?

patroclo7 · 2008-12-16 18:58:28

Can xorg make the hard drive grind more?

Last edited by patroclo7 (2008-12-16 18:58:43)

Gullible Jones · 2008-12-16 21:25:30

Hmm, new Xorg might be it now that I think about it. Although I hadn't noticed this stuff until the latest kernel update.

dolby · 2008-12-16 21:34:54

I was about to ask the same regarding xorg. I think its xorg related.I get frequent freezes with firefox, even if i dont view flash related webpages. For example moving back & forward makes firefox to stop responding.

ammon · 2008-12-16 22:30:27

Yes, new Xorg is too bugy. This is my 5th Arch install cuz it. And then i learned to work around them...

Gullible Jones · 2008-12-17 03:13:46

Whatever's going on, Debian is much more responsive than Arch here...

skottish · 2008-12-17 03:19:36

I've noticed in increase in performance since the xorg upgrade, and I haven't noticed any decrease at any time recently. So, I'd say compare video cards and drivers and see if that means anything:

nVidia 8800GT, 512MB
nvidia and nvidia-utils 177.82

femc · 2008-12-17 03:25:18

Did a fresh Arch FTP install today with latest kernel, xorg, catalyst drivers (8.12) and xfce, and everything is very sluggish in Xfce. I guess it's either Xorg or Catalyst related.. or is Catalyst-8.12 eliminated?

jacko · 2008-12-17 03:49:23

Same sluggishness, I also thought it was the kernel, I been using 2.6.28 since rc1. Only real changes I have noticed where the new nvidia drivers for the new xorg-server, this was an improvement. Also having native 64 bit flash and now jre helps alot as well.

But programs like firefox for me get (molasses on a cold day) slow when I have more then couple tabs open. This was never an issue in the past. This is very annoying because it clearly looks like I have memory left to burn.

broch · 2008-12-18 04:59:19

I don't see degraded performance with 2.6.28.rc*
on the other hand nvidia 180.x has a lot of problems with severely slowing down OS, memory leakage and excessive memory usage in general. All reported on nvidia site.

The only thing I noticed is that there is slight boot time increase with recent official (2.6.27.2 and up and all 2.6.28-rc*) and rc*git kernels, however OS responsiveness is unchanged.

Bysshe · 2008-12-19 02:02:41

Firefox has an exaggerated reaction to having an oversized/full web cache.

What actually had a rather huge affect on firefox performance for me was this:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spe … th_dnsmasq

Otherwise, which might be all in my head, but seems to me the firefox issue is the result of flashplugin continuing to render offscreen animations. For me, it seems that flash animations are compounding the more tabs you have, or the busier the webpage is. I couldn't begin to guess whose responsibility that is or how to fix it. Flashplugin works like crap for me anyway. If sound plays through it, when sound initialises, it makes an armageddon-style zap noise at a billion decibals.

Firefox has been less of an issue for me lately, though. Was there another update? Beyond that, most notable changes I've done is recompiled with cpu flags more of the system, and rather simplified my xorg. conf. It fits in the default size terminal window, plus about five empty lines. My other comp using unichrome driver doesn't like to have xorg.conf touched at all though. No performance modifiers and no simplification.

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Card0"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        VendorName      "nVidia Corporation"
        BoardName       "NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420]"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Monitor0"
        DisplaySize     260 188
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Screen0"
        DefaultDepth    24
        Option          "metamodes" "1024x768_75 +0+0"
EndSection

good luck, and I'll check back if anything else comes to mind.

Ranguvar · 2008-12-19 03:11:23

Xorg is consuming 212MB of RAM here, with Firefox, VLC, and Go-OO loaded. Compiz Fusion standalone. It isn't a problem, I have 4GB, but it is a bit excessive. That stat is from the RES column of top. I don't have stats from the old Xorg to compare against.

zenlord · 2008-12-19 09:34:45

On my laptop I'm using the sis-driver and with the new xorg, X is much more responsive (could als be caused by a new slim-version).

After logging into slim and with openbox, conky, tint2 and wbar, I have only ca. 70MB used ram. With firefox this rises to something like 100-110MB.

I'm also looking to driver-specific issues. I've seen error-reports on this forum with fglrx and intel lately - and in general there are a lot of complaints about the nvidia-linuxdriver. I guess I'm lucky with my crappy sis-card

Zl.

Gullible Jones · 2008-12-19 23:27:39

FWIW, Sidux seems to be suffering from this problem as well (and it doesn't use the new Xorg); the most obvious symptom is very slow scrolling and visible artifacts in GTK file selection dialogs.

femc · 2008-12-20 19:45:46

Also my glxgears FPS has drop down from 5500 -> 1500.

kraftman13 · 2009-02-24 12:02:18

Gullible Jones wrote:

Whatever's going on, Debian is much more responsive than Arch here...

I have to agree. I used Kubuntu and it was much more responsive. For example when I'm copying file from ntfs partition or when I'm splitting it Arch becames incredibly unresponsive and hangs for few seconds from time to time. I suppose those problems are related to not proper scheduler settings for desktop computers in Arch. We just get generic kernel and we need to fit it to our needs (different settings for desktops, different for servers etc.).

This is solution for some games under wine (from winehq forum):

Sounds like the same scheduler issue I was having introduced in 2.6.24. Try put this in /etc/sysctl.conf or /etc/sysctl.d/

Code:
kernel.sched_features=21
kernel.sched_batch_wakeup_granularity_ns=25000000
kernel.sched_min_granularity_ns=4000000

and then run sysctl -p
These options are not available unless "Kernel debugging"
(CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL) and "Collect sheduler debugging info"
(CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG) in "Kernel hacking" are enabled so you most likely
need to recompile.

Maybe we need some tuning for desktops too?

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-16 03:46:41

Anyone else getting crappy performance lately?

#2 2008-12-16 11:36:29

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#3 2008-12-16 12:03:30

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#4 2008-12-16 13:51:30

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#5 2008-12-16 15:30:20

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#6 2008-12-16 15:56:45

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#7 2008-12-16 17:15:26

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#24 2008-12-20 19:45:46

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#25 2009-02-24 12:02:18

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