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Hi Alex, |
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On Wednesday 25 August 2010 03:32:40 Alex Schuster wrote: |
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> Me again. |
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> |
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> I have an AMD Athlon(tm) Dual Core Processor 4850e CPU, on-board Radeon HD |
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> 3200 graphics, 4GB of memory, an 1.5 TB drive. Lots of LVM volumes, all |
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> encrypted, except for /usr/src and portage stuff. The system is ~amd64, |
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> and I have -march=k8-sse3 in my CFLAGS. Current kernel is 2.6.34-tuxonice, |
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> but I also tried others. I'm running KDE4 with desktop effects enabled, X |
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> itself takes about 30-40% of CPU time according to top. After system |
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> startup and login into KDE, 3.5G of RAM are occupied. This increases after |
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> a while, and I need swap space. Nothing to worry about I think. |
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Encrypted filesystems can cause additional with activity, but I would expect |
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that to remain the same over a long period. |
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However, how is the write and read performance on those disks? |
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You're running KDE4, guess you went for the default and use mysql for "app- |
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office/akonadi-server". |
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I switched to using "sqlite" for this due to issues getting it to work with |
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mysql. I think this might help there? |
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> Performance does not feel too bad at first. But after a while, I cannot |
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> even play videos during emerges. The playback stutters, sometimes I have |
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> pauses for several seconds. As long as there is no swap space occpied, |
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> it's not so bad I think. Maybe I have a probelm with disk I/O, and things |
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> get much worse when swapping occurs. When I look at iotop, I see |
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> various programs like chromium and various KDE applications appear. I |
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> guess that's normal, but should not be noticeable. Hey, there were times |
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> when I created a 2G tmpfs for /var/tmp/portage, with only 3G on |
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> my 32bit system. BTW, I lowered my swappiness to 10. This helps a little I |
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> think, because the swapping occurs later, the system is more responsive. |
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Do you also encrypt swap? |
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Disk I/O is, in my experience, a very common cause for "freeze-ups". |
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Can you test with unencrypted disks to see if the issue occurs then as well? |
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> And I have similar problems when copying data between some old PATA |
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> drives. When I copy stuff and do a mkfs on another partition, mplayer |
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> sometimes stutters and hangs for ten seconds. No joy. Working with KDE |
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> sucks, switching dektops sometimes takes ages, and even now I am typing |
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> faster than kmail can display the characters. That's with am emerge of |
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> chromium running, with PORTAGE_NICENESS=10 and using ionice -c 3. Load is |
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> around 8, but sometimes gets even higher. And then, load suddenly drops |
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> back to lower values, as if somthing was blocking. Some applications |
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> swapping, maybe. |
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Very possibly, maybe an idea to check which applications are hogging the |
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memory. If it is the swapping of the system, then this will be caused by the |
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most memory-hungry processes. |
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Can you post the result of: "ps axu"? |
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This will give an indication which processes are running and using a lot of |
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memory. |
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> Now I am out of ideas. I really hope someone here has one. I cannot work |
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> with this system any more when emerges are going on. |
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Had similar issues with a desktop machine myself, managed to kill some |
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"features" that I wasn't using and this solved most of the problems. |
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> I put my kernel config, make.conf, dmesg and such stuff to |
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> http://www.wonkology.org/gentoo/ in case someone wants to have a look at |
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> it. Any help is GREATLY appreciated. |
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Lets see where checking for IO-speeds and memory-usage of your apps take us :) |
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-- |
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Joost |
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