Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

sa · 2008-09-24 23:02:06

arch has slowly been getting slower bit by bit, but I let it slide for a while. started up my laptop today and everything is painfully slow. Pacman takes a couple minutes just to retrieve new update lists, yaourt takes minutes before displaying anything, when I start X/Openbox it's about 5 or 10 minutes before I can even right click open a menu. Yesterday, I was opening up GIMP in a matter of seconds, but it just took about a minute or two to load. Can't imagine this'd be a hardware issue because the laptop is a few months old and hasn't had any problems - other OSes on the drive load fine and all. My / partition is ext3 and has a bit under 1GB of free space - I didn't realize how much space I needed to distribute everything when I formatted everything and I've been meaning to repartition the drive. Is there any chance that could be what's slowing down my computer so much?

Last edited by sa (2008-10-02 03:40:47)

BlackIkeEagle · 2008-09-24 23:06:31

what about your disk activity ??
does it look like there is a mass disk access ?

sa · 2008-09-24 23:14:43

not that I know of. this happens immediately after boot.

also, applications work fine/normal speed after they start up. it just takes ages for them to start.

Last edited by sa (2008-09-24 23:20:11)

chochem · 2008-09-24 23:40:46

A longshot: Could it be swap/RAM issue? What does 'free -m' produce?

sa · 2008-09-24 23:47:57

chochem wrote:

A longshot: Could it be swap/RAM issue? What does 'free -m' produce?

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3885       1183       2701          0        185        568
-/+ buffers/cache:        430       3455
Swap:         4097          0       4097

I'd be shocked if it was a RAM issue, unless there was a program that was eating all my RAM. I've got Conky monitoring CPU loads, RAM usage and all that and I'm still getting speed problems when there are no more than 2% loads on anything. Starting to think it's a filesystem problem? I'm going to fsck everything and report back

Profjim · 2008-09-25 00:18:23

I've seen exactly the kind of behavior you report when I had ram/swap issues. Once it was connected to me running out of /tmp space because I had /tmp mounted as a tempfs---so in RAM---but I was running out of RAM so there needed to be massive swaps and so on.

But your free -m says no swap is being used, so I don't think that's your problem. Still, if you don't work it out by yourself, it might be useful to see the results of "mount" and "df -h".

sa · 2008-09-25 00:49:32

[sa@psd ~]$ mount
/dev/sda7 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev type ramfs (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/sda5 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda8 on /home type jfs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /ntfs type fuseblk (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)
[sa@psd ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7             8.0G  6.5G  1.1G  87% /
none                  1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5              43M   17M   25M  40% /boot
/dev/sda8              55G  4.2G   51G   8% /home
/dev/sda1             100G   39G   62G  39% /ntfs
[sa@psd ~]$

How can I measure disk activity?

Something else must be happening because even the bash prompt at startup after logging in takes a little while to show up. I'm not sure what to do

Last edited by sa (2008-09-25 00:56:29)

Profjim · 2008-09-25 00:58:52

OK, I don't see anything unusual or problematic in your mount/df results. As to how to measure disk activity, I'm not sure. But you could try launching htop or top in one virtual terminal and start a process that you know to start your slowdowns in another, and then switch back to the first and watch the htop / top screen to see if it reveals what's using all the processor cycles up.

Do you also get slowdowns in the virtual terminals (i.e. linux console)? Or only in X?

sa · 2008-09-25 01:18:09

It seems to be fairly responsive in the virtual console. I'm in the console now using Links and everything I've tried seems to work pretty well and fast (even noticable improvements with Pacman and Yaourt), so I'm guessing it's just a problem with X. I had to remove the .Xauthority files a few days ago because X wouldn't even start. What can I do with Openbox/Xorg?

Edit: I just upgraded the nVidia (proprietary) drivers and performance seems to be much better. Strange, but I'll come back if this doesn't solve everything.

Last edited by sa (2008-09-25 01:33:24)

cwjiof · 2008-09-25 14:35:17

If you find pacman become very slow, don't hesitate to use pacman-cage, which can create a loopbacked filesystem to give you the least response times when using pacman.

Add the followings into /etc/pacman.conf:

[archlinuxfr]
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/i686

or

[archlinuxfr]
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/x86_64

depending on your CPU's type, and use

pacman -Sy pacman-cage

to install it.

Follow the post-install instructions to make it begin to work.

Last edited by cwjiof (2008-09-25 14:40:41)

sa · 2008-09-27 00:01:31

ARGH. it's taking forever to load programs again, the video driver update only worked for a day or two D:

i noticed Conky starts right up. when I open a program, it shows that the program sits there idling with 0% CPU usage for a minute or two before everything opens at once. the disk activity light is off this entire time.

stonecrest · 2008-09-27 00:11:18

Is your lo interface up? Is your hostname in /etc/hosts? Are you using something like cpufreq and are you running at a low freq? There are lots of things you can check..

Misfit138 · 2008-09-27 00:45:17

stonecrest wrote:

Is your lo interface up? Is your hostname in /etc/hosts? .

This has the ring of truth to me.
I'm guessing stonecrest is right.

sa · 2008-09-27 19:36:29

stonecrest wrote:

Is your lo interface up? Is your hostname in /etc/hosts? Are you using something like cpufreq and are you running at a low freq? There are lots of things you can check..

/etc/hosts contains:

#<ip-address>    <hostname.domain.org>    <hostname>
127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain    localhost

Local Loopback shows up in ifconfig, if that is what you mean. I'm afraid I don't know how to check cpufreq...

fwojciec · 2008-09-27 19:41:15

You should add the actual hostname of your computer to that line, so it looks something like:

127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain    localhost    actual_hostname

See this for more info: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beg … tc.2Fhosts

Daenyth · 2008-09-28 03:38:44

I would also look at "iotop" if you still need to check disk activity.

sa · 2008-09-29 03:06:24

ok, the loopback fix seemed to remedy the problem. thanks!

sa · 2008-10-02 03:43:08

sigh. same thing again. this time I can see the I/O light on constantly. i'm starting to wonder if it's an actual disk problem because grub took longer than normal to display now, too. that seems very unlikely though. after a while of constnat disk activity, it stopped and the OS responded like normal. tried quitting out the X session and starting it again, but the problem wasn't still there. here's the hosts:

#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#<ip-address>    <hostname.domain.org>    <hostname>
127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain    localhost    psd
192.168.1.7    psd.domain.com    psd

# End of file

Last edited by sa (2008-10-02 03:45:15)

Wittfella · 2008-10-02 06:58:41

Did you check that its not cron running 'updatedb' periodically. This causes several minutes of disk thrashing and unresponsivness on my machine.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-09-24 23:02:06

Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#2 2008-09-24 23:06:31

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#3 2008-09-24 23:14:43

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#4 2008-09-24 23:40:46

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#5 2008-09-24 23:47:57

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#6 2008-09-25 00:18:23

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#7 2008-09-25 00:49:32

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#8 2008-09-25 00:58:52

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#9 2008-09-25 01:18:09

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#10 2008-09-25 14:35:17

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#11 2008-09-27 00:01:31

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#12 2008-09-27 00:11:18

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#13 2008-09-27 00:45:17

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#14 2008-09-27 19:36:29

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#15 2008-09-27 19:41:15

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#16 2008-09-28 03:38:44

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#17 2008-09-29 03:06:24

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#18 2008-10-02 03:43:08

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

#19 2008-10-02 06:58:41

Re: Arch just got painfully slow (for the third time)

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