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Me again. |
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I wrote here about my problems with mplayer stuttering during emerges. |
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Then I wrote that the problem went away when I installed Gentoo again, |
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moving from i686 to x86_64. But the problems are back, and worse than |
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ever. This is driving me crazy. CRAZY! |
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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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|
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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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|
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And it feels like things get worse and worse, it's not like there was a |
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specific point when I thought it's slow again. Like there were some |
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degragation going on - fragmentation, bitrot, I don't know. It's just how |
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it feels to me. |
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I am debugging this for some days now. I tried different kernels, from |
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2.6.29 to 2.6.35, including the kernel I had running after the switch to |
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64bit, when I thought all was fine. No change. But all kernels were |
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configured nearly identical, so I booted a GRML live-cd and used this |
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kernel .config as a template. Does not feel better. |
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|
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When I thought the problem was gone, I had installed the system on my 2nd |
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1.5 TB drive. Meanwhile I copied the partitions back to the 1st drive, so |
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I suspected a difference in the drives. I use the 2nd drive for backups |
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(using rdiff-backup), with similar partitions, so I only have to exchange |
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the LVM volume group names of the two drives in order to run my system |
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from the 2nd one. I tried this, but it did not help. |
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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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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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|
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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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|
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Wonko |