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#1 2009-02-24 00:41:38

Tinuz
Member
Registered: 2006-02-21
Posts: 3

Weird laptop slowdowns.

I am posting this here because I am running arch on a laptop, but I honestly do not have a clue where I should begin to look for the source of my problem.

Recently my laptop has begun to act insanely slow....taking 30 seconds to pull up a terminal, web browsing is impossible, etc. Now, this has never before been a problem, and shouldn't be as I run a dual-core 2 @ 1.83Ghz with 2GB RAM. At first, I thought it was a software problem, but a reinstallation wouldn't help....I switched to Arch (ubuntu before) and still, the same problem! Now, all the times this problem occurred it was while I was streaming online video content with Flash. Nothing uses an extraordinary amount of RAM or CPU, there seems to be no swapping or whatever.

Furthermore, a reboot doesn't really help, it takes a long time to boot and then it is still slow. A little bit faster, but it seems to slow down during use. This is all up untill a certain point (can't find exactly when or why) and then everything returns back to normal......

Now, my laptop is a HP nc6400 and has been acting a little cranky lately (about 2 years old). I blame this on it being running a little hot lately, but I intend to open it up and clean it soon.

I don't know what to put here as extra info, so please just ask!

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#2 2009-02-24 16:09:52

kaola_linux
Member
From: Bacolod City/Philippines
Registered: 2008-09-23
Posts: 513

Re: Weird laptop slowdowns.

This is maybe due to overheating...What time does it do like that? Morning, noon, or night? Did you fell your laptop? If it's a C2D cpu it shouldn't be that hot...Maybe something is blocking the ventilation of your laptop...You might consider looking on your hardware or even open it up and see if there is something strange...:)


Netbook (Acer Aspire One 110 || 160gb SATA HD || 1.5gb ram): archlinux i686 / KDEmod 4.3
Registered Linux User # 481212 / Machine Registration # 390468
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates?"

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#3 2009-02-27 03:19:46

Tinuz
Member
Registered: 2006-02-21
Posts: 3

Re: Weird laptop slowdowns.

Okay, did some more testing, opened it up, here are the conclusions:

1) The insides are clean, but the problem (and the heat) persists.

2) I ran with a temp sensor for a while now, and while getting temps as high as 70C the computer didn't slow down. Now I am in the 50C range and typing this with a 5 -10 character lag.

3) A friend of mine suggested that it might be a video buffer problem and to check I tested the booting of a heavy app, This took foreever, mugh longer than any lag otherwise. So it's definitely slow, and not just appearing slow.

4) HD read speeds are the following (through hdparm):
Timing cached reads:   156 MB in  2.00 seconds =  78.04 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:   88 MB in  3.04 seconds =  28.96 MB/sec

Seems okay to me.

5) The IRQ's seem to be in order, a general snapshot:

timer: hovering around 200 per second on my first CPU
Videocard and sound are on the same IRQ and doing about 200 as well.
i8042 (seems to be some input controller): hits about 500 a second when I do something with keyboard or mouse.
iwl3945 (wireless) about 20 on average (more on this later)

The other are all zero, except for the AHCI which is like 5 or something at times of HDD access.

6) It's not the wireless or the bleutooth, I have a hard switch on my computer for this and turning them off doesn't matter.

7) Memtest is clean, no surprise there

8) HDD SMART and seltest clean as well.

Once again, this feels like a software issue. However, the fact that it persisted after a switch from Ubuntu to Arch (no file transfer) and through (cold) reboots make me think otherwise. Also, it affects the boot speed as well. One argument in favor of the software side is that it always seems to start during flash use (Hulu.com and last.fm, for example) and is intermittent (had a perect run for two days here, and now it's back to slow again).

Hope someone can help.

Last edited by Tinuz (2009-02-27 03:39:30)

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#4 2009-02-27 03:49:49

Tinuz
Member
Registered: 2006-02-21
Posts: 3

Re: Weird laptop slowdowns.

A small edit:

My computer just sped up again (Yay!) and repeating the hdparm command now gives me a timing cached read of 950 meg per second.....so evidently, the HDD is the culprit of this problem. Now the question is what can cause this and how to solve it? I mean, can I just replace it? Or could this be a controller issue?

How do I test for this?

And it slowed down again....:( (A repeat hdparm showed that the result is consistent, down to 25 meg per second.)

EDIT: It's definitely got something to do with flash. I have everything closed and sometimes (not always) things speed up. Open a web browser, no problem....opne a webpage with flash (any flash) and it's slow again.....flash making my HDD cache perform poorly? Weirrrrd, especially becasue it's not always there.

Last edited by Tinuz (2009-02-27 04:05:36)

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