Arch Linux

dopey68

Member

From: Adelaide, Australia

Registered: 2012-06-21

Posts: 21

Poor laptop performance after recent linux-3.4 updates

Since the recent update to linux-3.4 I've been experiencing very poor performance on my laptop. It is particularly noticeable in firefox and thubnderbird which take ages to load and are very slow to redraw the screen. Browsing the web is virtually impossible because firefox is so slow to update the screen.

A week or two ago, when I discovered this, I managed to downgrade just the kernel to linux-3.3.7, and everything was running smoothly again.
However after the recent updates to glibc there are now too many dependancies to downgrade again.

I've noticed other discussion on higher than expected load averages since linux-3.3.5 (here and here), but I'm not sure this is related as I had no problem with 3.3.7 or earlier.

I've also stumbled onto a curious work-around.
If I put my laptop into standby, and wake it up again, my system is back to running smoothly again.
This would suggest to me some sort of power management initialisation issue with the 3.4 kernel.

Here is some info on my machine:
HP Compaq 6715b, AMD Turion64 X2, ATI RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series] (Actually X1300)
Linux tigger 3.4.5-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 16 21:35:54 CEST 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I running Gnome is Classic Mode for my desktop.

Has anyone experience anything similar, or know what the problem might be?

funkygaucho

Member

Registered: 2012-07-24

Posts: 2

Re: Poor laptop performance after recent linux-3.4 updates

Hello,

i'm experiencing the same behaviour on my old HP nx6320. It worked like a charm less than a week ago until the day i've peformed the infamous /lib symlink update. I've tried changing intel driver modes (sna/uxa), and tried other kernel parameters but i had no success. On the other hand, i notice that several processes suffer from this problem when priority is rised by the scheduler, not only firefox (e.g. tracker-miner, Xorg, gnome-shell). Although Firefox is the most notorious, going almost unresponsive.

Any help will be much appreciated. I do not post system details just because i don't know what kind of information could be useful to track the issue.

Regards

skunktrader

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2010-02-14

Posts: 1,676

Re: Poor laptop performance after recent linux-3.4 updates

I've noticed other discussion on higher than expected load averages since linux-3.3.5 (here and here), but I'm not sure this is related as I had no problem with 3.3.7 or earlier.

I don't believe the load average problem is related -- especially since it is fixed in 3.4.6

funkygaucho

Member

Registered: 2012-07-24

Posts: 2

Re: Poor laptop performance after recent linux-3.4 updates

Ok, after a couple of weeks splitting my head to understand what happened i found the source of my slow performance: laptop PSU. The same week i've performed the '/lib becomes symlink' upgrade, i received a new PSU manufactured in China for my HP laptop. Voltage on the mid pin was wrong, and HP laptop drops CPU speed drastically on that scenario. So i ended up opening the charger and adding a voltage divider to get 7.5 volts on that pin. That solved the problem and now my Arch deployment performs like a charm again