Gentoo Archives: gentoo-performance

From: Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org>
To: gentoo-performance@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-performance] Re: Bad desktop performance, I think
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:03:34
Message-Id: 201006142059.54157.wonko@wonkology.org
In Reply to: Re: Bad desktop performance, I think (was: Re: [gentoo-performance] Hello? Thump-thump?) by Mansour Moufid
1 Oh, well. It's been quite a while. I wanted to reply earlier, but then
2 kmail crashed and I lost the mail. ThenI was quite busy with other things,
3 and so on.
4
5 Mansour Moufid wrote:
6
7 > Hello all,
8 >
9 > On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:07 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org>
10 > wrote:
11 > > I am a little disappointed by the performance of my system. mplayer
12 > > sometimes stutters a little during the calculation phase of emerge
13 > > -DpN @world, swfdec-player does so even more. Well, sometimes even
14 > > without emerges, I guess this flash player is not coded so well.
15 > >
16 > > My system is not the fastest, silence and low power consumption was
17 > > more important for me. Still, it should be fast enough I think. I
18 > > have an AMD Athlon(tm) Dual Core Processor 4850e CPU (using -march),
19 > > 4GB of memory, an 1.5 TB drive. The whole system is encrypted
20 > > (aes-xts-plain) and LVMed. While the LVM overhead should be small,
21 > > encryption of course creates some extra load. /var/tmp/portage is an
22 > > unencrypted tmpfs volume though. kernel is 2.6.31-tuxonice. I'm
23 > > running KDE4 with desktop effects enabled (running ati-drivers), X
24 > > itself takes about 30-40% of CPU time according to top. mplayer
25 > > itself needs less than 20%.
26 >
27 > I also use LVM encryption, and mplayer plays 720p at 30 fps just fine
28 > with only the integrated Intel graphics and 1 GB of RAM. So, I suspect
29 > you are just not using the full potential of your CPU.
30
31 Yeah, playing movies without stuttering should be no problem nowadays.
32
33 > If you haven't already: grep flags /proc/cpuinfo; add any of the
34 > {mmx,mmext,sse,sse2,ssse3,3dnow,3dnowext} flags there along with
35 > "custom-cpuopts" to your mplayer line in /etc/portage/package.use;
36 > then re-emerge of course.
37
38 I did that, but did not see much of a difference.
39 Anyways, this would be a workaround only, the real problem must be
40 somewhere else. With movies it's only most annoying. But also amarok is
41 interrupted. Any playing Quake3 when updatedb kicks in is no joy, too.
42
43 > With 4GB if RAM you should probably also set swappiness to a lower
44 > value than default.
45
46 Thanks, that was a good idea! This made the system more responsive when
47 switching desktops. The drawback, however, is when starting memory-
48 intensive applications, this takes really really long then.
49
50 > That's all I can think of for now, good luck!
51
52 This weekend I installed Gentoo again, this time with 64bit. And all those
53 problems are just gone. Even with [io]nice, emerges do not make mplayer
54 stutter in any way. Weird, because the setup is nearly identical - same
55 packages, same make.conf (except for compiler flags), nearly identical
56 kernel .config. I just removed 2GB, with the remaining 2GB the system is
57 running much better than with 2.75GB and 32bits.
58
59 Whatever - I'm happy now.
60
61 Wonko

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-performance] Horrible performance Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org>