Arch Linux

AdisonCavani

Member

Registered: 2020-10-06

Posts: 4

System is unresponsive, freezing all time. Installed on USB 3.0 stick

Hi,
I was using ArchLinux as my daily driver with no issues. It was installed on SSD.
But I need to have portable OS, so I can launch it on any PC. I decided to install Arch on USB Stick (link below), but it's very slow, all programs are freezing all the time. Even simple command in console is taking a dozen of seconds!
It's probably not a GPU driver issue, because it also happends on AMD GPU and different PC.

System specs
I installed Arch on this USB stick

The system is unstable, very slow, freezing all the time. I get message: "xxx is not responding. Force Quit or wait?"
I'm using latest Gnome, LTS kernel and nvidia-lts (Don't kill me plz. Normally I would use latest stable kernel, but I tried also LTS and system is also freezing).
I was using this guides to install it:
Normal installation guide
Installation on removable medium guide

What I tried to fix it?
I tried to install with journaling stored in RAM, not disk;
With standard journaling;
Standart kernel and drivers;
LTS kernel and drivers;
Tested on another PC with different specs;
Adding "usbhid xhci_hcd" to MODULES section in mkinitcpio.conf and regenerating with "mkinitcpio -p linux [linux-lts]"

Log files

It allso happends in TTY console. System is launch/power off is very slow.
What can cause this kind of freezes?

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,516

Website

Re: System is unresponsive, freezing all time. Installed on USB 3.0 stick

What can cause this kind of freezes?

A low quality flash drive (which is most of them).  In fact all your symptoms support this possibility.  Have you ever tested the actual IO speeds of the flash drive?  Many cheap flash drives will advertise reasonably good IO speeds (as that one does), but completely fail to deliver anything close to the advertised speeds.

Most of the negative reviews on that flash drive highlight that they get abysmal IO speeds (one showing ~5MB/s reads and ~2MB/s writes).  Of course several 5 star reviews give superlative reviews of the speed ... I never really trust 5 star reviews on Amazon now though (many of them are either paid, or from the seller themselves).

Last edited by Trilby (2020-10-07 20:53:53)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

AdisonCavani

Member

Registered: 2020-10-06

Posts: 4

Re: System is unresponsive, freezing all time. Installed on USB 3.0 stick

What can cause this kind of freezes?

A low quality flash drive (which is most of them).  In fact all your symptoms support this possibility.  Have you ever tested the actual IO speeds of the flash drive?  Many cheap flash drives will advertise reasonably good IO speeds (as that one does), but completely fail to deliver anything close to the advertised speeds.

Yup. I tested it and I get about the same result as specification say.

I was testing this with hdparm and I got ~200MB/s read and 60MB/s write.
As the wiki say:

"Note: hdparm indicates only the pure read speed of a hard drive, and is not a valid benchmark. A value higher than 40MB/s (while idle) is however acceptable on an average system."

Source

I wasn't looking at reviews on amazon. I bought it in a local computer store.

Last edited by AdisonCavani (2020-10-07 21:07:46)

solskog

Member

Registered: 2020-09-05

Posts: 462

Re: System is unresponsive, freezing all time. Installed on USB 3.0 stick

cryptroot root=/dev/mapper/cryptroot

I noticed you have encrypted partition on USB stick? could this be a performance bottleneck?
I installed archlinux + gnome on "kingston dt101 g3" that is much slower then your usb stick according to spec. Gnome started as a wayland-session, I can streaming video, play html5 games, play offline simple games that comes with gnome-extra package without problem.
Kernel 5.8.13-arch1-1, filsystem partition ext4 with journal enabled. Slow start/shutdown but the system overall is stable.

Last edited by solskog (2020-10-08 08:59:34)