Arch Linux

jorpheus

Member

Registered: 2008-11-07

Posts: 98

Degraded performance

I'm experiencing a huge difference in performance of Open Arena and Sauerbraten but cannot figure out why. Usually I'd look at the last update, but the last update was three days ago and these games worked just fine yesterday. Still, I did try to downgrade all video-related stuff and even tried an older kernel, as well as killing processes one by one to see if performance improves.

So, in addition to a lower framerate, the games seem to be constantly doing I/O  and freezing temporarily. And I just realized it's probably worse than I thought - writing this post, the same thing happens, but on a smaller scale - emits that 'hard drive is doing something' sound, a short freeze, and then it's okay again.

Is this a sign of impending doom (HDD failure)? Maybe something EXT4-related?

Info:
Lenovo N500
Linux 2.6.32-ARCH (i686)
All pkgs up to date.

djgera

Developer

From: Buenos Aires - Argentina

Registered: 2008-12-24

Posts: 723

Website

Re: Degraded performance

update to 2.6.32 from 2.6.31? Try this, disable the new "low latency" mode in CFQ (the I/O scheduler):

echo 0 > /sys/class/block/<your harddisk>/queue/iosched/low_latency

but maybe is unrelated.

jorpheus

Member

Registered: 2008-11-07

Posts: 98

Re: Degraded performance

update to 2.6.32 from 2.6.31? Try this, disable the new "low latency" mode in CFQ (the I/O scheduler):

echo 0 > /sys/class/block/<your harddisk>/queue/iosched/low_latency

but maybe is unrelated.

I've had .32 for some time now. And I tried booting a .31 kernel.

Anyway, tried this thing, no change.

Smartctl wasn't helpful either.

sctincman

Member

From: CO (USA)

Registered: 2009-04-08

Posts: 85

Re: Degraded performance

How much memory do you have? Maybe it's using swap space. Can check in 'free' to see where memory is being allocate, and if it is swapping and you have memory available, you can turn down swappiness. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Max … Swappiness

Interested to see if this works, been having a similar problem (but on a less noticable scale) with my lenovo computer

jorpheus

Member

Registered: 2008-11-07

Posts: 98

Re: Degraded performance

How much memory do you have? Maybe it's using swap space. Can check in 'free' to see where memory is being allocate, and if it is swapping and you have memory available, you can turn down swappiness. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Max … Swappiness

Interested to see if this works, been having a similar problem (but on a less noticable scale) with my lenovo computer

Checked it, no swap is used.

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,362

Re: Degraded performance

I'd do a complete backup ASAP. It may be hard disc failure, which is very bad on a non-backed-up machine.

After doing the backup, boot from USB/CD and run some tests. Parted Magic or something would do the trick.

---

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jorpheus

Member

Registered: 2008-11-07

Posts: 98

Re: Degraded performance

I'd do a complete backup ASAP. It may be hard disc failure, which is very bad on a non-backed-up machine.

After doing the backup, boot from USB/CD and run some tests. Parted Magic or something would do the trick.

Which ones? I tried fsck and (again) smartctl (self-test, the quick one).

Also, now that KMS is mandatory, Open Arena is stretched. I'm pretty sure it's KMS-related, since downgrading xf86-video-intel and disabling modesetting in GRUB fixes it.

Update:
Just tried Quake Live - it runs as good as ever. This is really starting to get on my nerves...

Last edited by jorpheus (2010-02-11 16:55:52)

jorpheus

Member

Registered: 2008-11-07

Posts: 98

Re: Degraded performance

Could this somehow be related to disk write performance? I ran Phoronix, IOzone write result seems abysmal - can anyone confirm this?

Last edited by jorpheus (2010-02-11 23:20:54)

thestinger

Package Maintainer (PM)

From: Toronto, Canada

Registered: 2010-01-23

Posts: 478

Re: Degraded performance

this really sounds like hard drive failure; see this

Last edited by thestinger (2010-02-12 00:05:14)