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#1 2010-11-08 22:39:19

xordae
Member
Registered: 2010-11-06
Posts: 5

Arch becomes sluggish

Hey,

I installed Arch i686 on an old notebook of mine with Silicon Integrated Systems hardware, ~1200 Mhz, 512 MB RAM.

Now it's running rather smooth with LXDE, I've been leaving it on for hours at a time torrenting, watching movies, browsing. But it's happened twice now that the system suddenly becomes very, very slow. Everything comes with a delay, opening Midori took minutes. Logging out and back in does not help the problem. CPU meter is low, but the slightest task puts it at 100% for a period of time. When I open task manager, it shows a high percentage (even over 100 sometimes) being used by task manager. The other tasks also show higher numbers than usual, X particularly. When I power down or reboot from this state, I don't see the CLI describing the shutdown process, but instead there's just a black screen and after about twice the usual time, the BIOS boots and everything's back to normal.

I don't think it's the harddrive. I was streaming a video from network and it got very choppy. Didn't do any reading from the IDE drive at the time. Graphics are unlikely too, or it wouldn't be slow using a terminal.

I pacman -Syu regularly. My / and /home are both on JFS with elevator=deadline.
On startup, there are some errors with IOAPIC and GSI in them, but I think that's a kernel regression and not to blame for this? It's like an overheating problem without overheating, or.. I don't know.

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#2 2010-11-08 22:59:58

graysky
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From: :wq
Registered: 2008-12-01
Posts: 10,595
Website

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

Hmm... run htop in a ssh session from another box and watch to see what's sapping the CPU when it happens again.  You can run sensors to monitor temp.


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#3 2010-11-08 23:28:08

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

What video driver are you using?

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#4 2010-11-08 23:55:12

xordae
Member
Registered: 2010-11-06
Posts: 5

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

It just happened again, and I ran htop from the same machine. Was there a reason you wanted me to do it remotely? 'Cause I only have one machine running Linux and that would complicate things. Htop showed high % for the heaviest tasks running at the time. Htop, X, Pidgin. It ate up less than the LXDE counterpart but the behaviour of the OS was the same. I also saw a large number of PIDs being occupied by console-kit-daemon --nodaemon or something like that. But that means it's still a single process, right?

I have the "sis" driver installed. Though I'm not using a 10-monitor.conf file at the moment, Xorg seems alright without it. There is no unknown hardware, so I let the autoconfiguration do its thing.

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#5 2010-11-09 00:08:14

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

The console-kit-daemon thing is normal, you can hide the multiple PIDs if you like.

Maybe you run out of RAM? CPU utilization goes through the roof and everything grinds to a near-halt - seems possible.

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#6 2010-11-09 00:17:45

xordae
Member
Registered: 2010-11-06
Posts: 5

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

RAM utilization is really low, usually below 100. I'll look into monitoring the temperature next.

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#7 2010-11-09 00:27:12

toofishes
Developer
From: Chicago, IL
Registered: 2006-06-06
Posts: 602
Website

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

Are there a bunch of errors spewed out in dmesg? Sometimes hardware getting in bad states makes the computer all but useless until you reboot, but there will be a lot of messages that come from the kernel in that case.

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#8 2010-11-09 00:53:09

xordae
Member
Registered: 2010-11-06
Posts: 5

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

Here is the dmesg output shortly after startup, system still OK. I'll check it again after it has slowed down.

Lm_sensors has not found a single sensor. I always knew this was a horrible notebook. wink

Last edited by xordae (2010-11-09 01:07:30)

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#9 2010-11-09 01:56:10

Cdh
Member
Registered: 2009-02-03
Posts: 1,098

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

Can you check the cpu frequency when it happens again? Maybe cpufreq-info from cpufreq-utils.
I'm only wildly guessing but maybe the CPU somehow gets underclocked?


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#10 2010-11-09 16:37:27

xordae
Member
Registered: 2010-11-06
Posts: 5

Re: Arch becomes sluggish

Unfortunately, there's no cpufreq driver that works with this type of Pentium 3. The only one not giving an error after modprobe is mperf, and that's no help right?

At this point I'm thinking it is a heat issue after all. Keeping the laptop cool has not produced any slowdown so far. Time will tell if that's consistent.

Thanks for all your help, guys.

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