Arch Linux

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

My system is stuttering. Help please.

Some days ago my system started having this annoying stutters: everything freezes for like 3 seconds, then goes back to normal. for example, if I move my mouse during one of these stutters, it jumps 3 or 4 times until the end of the movement, instead of one movement. If i'm listening music, it literally stutters.

The thing is, I don't know how to narrow this down to what's wrong. nothing abnormal in "top", so it's not a process eating up CPU. Any ideas?

jacko

Member

Registered: 2007-11-23

Posts: 840

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

what did u update right before things went awol? u could always parse the pacman logs to see.

rson451

Member

From: Annapolis, MD USA

Registered: 2007-04-15

Posts: 1,233

Website

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

have you by chance installed cpufreq recently?

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raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Thanks for the replies.

jacko:I can't really tell, because I don't know when this started exactly, because i think this happened before, when connecting to wireless networks, but this now happens more often, even if the network manager is not running, so i guess it's not the problem

rson451: nope

zenlord

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-05-24

Posts: 1,223

Website

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Setup conky to display all cpu- and memory hungry apps on your desktop?

Maybe try the vesa-driver instead of the videodriver you're using at the moment (might not help because it's not only a visual stutter you're describing)

Go through the logs to see if there are any warnings or errors (dmesg and xorg.log to begin with, then skim through '/var/log/')

See what daemons you are running and try disabling them one by one?

Zl.

11010010110

Member

Registered: 2008-01-14

Posts: 284

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Try !ing stuff from kernel modules and services

Does it happen in other desktop too (change to TWM / * in ~/.xinitrc)

Does it happen if you chroot to or from your system and then startx

mezoko

Member

Registered: 2005-03-26

Posts: 310

Website

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

^^
Your post hurts my eyes!

I had something like this, although I can't remember what the problem was. Try using a default video driver and see if that helps. Also do you stop networkmanager or is the applet simply not running? /etc/rc.d/network-manager stop

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"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Ok, this is definitely related to network manager. it happens when i disconnect from the network, and when i'm trying to connect. this wasn't happening before. what can I do?

zenlord

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-05-24

Posts: 1,223

Website

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Ditch networkmanager and use netcfg2 from testing. You'll find a very recent thread in the Announcements-section and a page in the wiki. netcfg2 is much more KISS and works as advertised.

Zl.

mezoko

Member

Registered: 2005-03-26

Posts: 310

Website

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

If you prefer not to enable testing (like me), you can use wicd, there a wiki page in the wiki, but really straight forward

(disable gnome-network-manager)
1. pacman -S wicd
2. /etc/rc.d/wicd start (add wicd to DAEMONS)
3. /usr/lib/wicd/tray.py or /usr/lib/wicd/guy.py
4. Connect and have fun!
(according to the wiki page you do not have to disable the network scripts)

One bug I've noticed though is that you have to manually specify the name servers

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"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Un-Arch-y question but,

are there frontends for those?

because my college's connection is really complicated (WPA Enterprise + TKIP + TLS + CA certificate file + user + etc etc) I can't really afford to lose network at this point of the semester

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: My system is stuttering. Help please.

Ok, so I tried wicd, and this still happened so i thought this maybe had something to do with my iwl module. I remembered editing modprobe.conf, because the drivers had problems if I didn't add "disable_hw_scan=1". I tried removing that line, and now it seems to work without stuttering.I hope they solved the problem by now

Thank you guys, for your replies. I'll look into Wicd, it's tray icon is much nicer than nm.applet's