Re: [gentoo-user] kde-apps/kde-l10n-16.04.3:5/5::gentoo conflicting with kde-apps/kdepim-l10n-15.12.3:5/5::gentoo

[james]

On 08/09/2016 09:17 AM, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 09, 2016 09:13:31 AM james wrote:
>
>> On 08/09/2016 07:42 AM, Michael Mol wrote:
>
>> > On Monday, August 08, 2016 10:45:09 PM Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>> >> On 08/08/2016 19:20, Michael Mol wrote:
>
>> >>> On Monday, August 08, 2016 06:52:15 PM Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>> >>>> On 08/08/2016 17:02, Michael Mol wrote:
>
>> >>> snip <<<
>
>> >>
>
>> >> KMail is the lost child of KDE for many months now, I reckon this
>
>> >> situation is just going to get worse and worse. I know for myself my
>
>> >> mail problems ceased the day I dumped KMail4 for claws and/or
> thunderbird
>
>> >
>
>> > That's really, really sad.
>
>> >
>
>> > I used Thunderbird for years, but I eventually had to stop when it
> would,
>
>> > averaging once a month (though sometimes not for a couple months,
>
>> > sometimes a couple times a week) explode in memory consumption and drive
>
>> > the entire system unresponsively into swap.
>
>> >
>
>> > I've tried claws from time to time due to other annoyances with
>
>> > Thunderbird, but I kept switching back. Not because I liked Tbird, but
>
>> > (IIRC) because of stability issues I had with claws.
>
>> >
>
>> > Even with the bugs it has, Kontact and Akonadi has been the most
> reliable
>
>> > mail client I've used in the last year. When it gives me problems, I
> know
>
>> > why, and I can address it. (Running a heavily tuned MySQLd instance
>
>> > behind Akonadi, for example...)
>
>> >
>
>> > I wish someone would pay me to fix this stuff; I'd be able to spend the
>
>> > time on it.
>
>>
>
>> Perhaps an experiment. Locate some folks that know about how to promote
>
>> 'crowd funding'. The propose a project like this, targeted at business
>
>> and user, to all pitch in. In fact, quite a few beloved open source
>
>> projects could benefit, if the idea of crowd funding took hold
>
>> on open source soft. Perhaps one of the foundations deeply involved in
>
>> the open source movement would get behind the idea?
>
>>
>
>> KDE is very popular, so the concept or something similar might just have
>
>> legs, even if it only funds a series of grad-students or young
>
>> programmers to maintain good FOSS projects?
>
>
>
> A wonderful thought. I rather expect KDE is already doing this, but if
> not, they ought to. (I'm sure someone who commits code to KDE reads this
> list...)
>
>
>
> Certainly wouldn't cover someone like me who has a family to support,
> but still.
>
>
>
>>
>
>> AS a side note, I put 32G of ram on my system and still at times it is
>
>> laggy with little processor load and htop shows little <30% ram usage.
>
>> What tools do you use to track down mem. management issues?
>
>
>
> I use Zabbix extensively at work, and have the Zabbix agent on my
> workstation reporting back various supported metrics. There's a great
> deal you can use (and--my favorite--abuse) Zabbix for, especially once
> you understand how it thinks.

Congradualtions! Of the net-analyzer crowd, you've manage to find one I 
have not spent time with........
>
>
>
>>
>
>> Any specific kernel tweaks?
>
>
>
> Most of my tweaks for KDE revolved around tuning mysqld itself. But for
> sysctls improving workstation responsiveness as it relates to memory
> interactions with I/O, these are my go-tos:
>
>
>
> vm.dirty_background_bytes = 1048576
> vm.dirty_bytes = 10485760
> vm.swappiness = 0

Mine are::
cat dirty_bytes
0
cat dirty_background_bytes
0
cat swappiness
60


>
> vm.dirty_background_bytes ensures that any data (i.e. from mmap or
> fwrite, not from swapping) waiting to be written to disk *starts*
> getting written to disk once you've got at least the configured amount
> (1MB) of data waiting. (If you've got a disk controller with
> battery-backed or flash-backed write cache, you might consider
> increasing this to some significant fraction of your write cache. I.e.
> if you've got a 1GB FBWC with 768MB of that dedicated to write cache,
> you might set this to 512MB or so. Depending on your workload. I/O
> tuning is for those of us who enjoy the dark arts.)
>
>
>
> vm.dirty_bytes says that once you've got the configured amount (10MB) of
> data waiting to be disk, then no more asynchronous I/O is permitted
> until you have no more data waiting; all outstanding writes must be
> finished first. (My rule of thumb is to have this between 2-10 times the
> value of vm.dirty_background_bytes. Though I'm really trying to avoid it
> being high enough that it could take more than 50ms to transfer to disk;
> that way, any stalls that do happen are almost imperceptible.)
>
>
>
> You want vm.dirty_background_bytes to be high enough that your hardware
> doesn't spend its time powered on if it doesn't have to be, and so that
> your hardware can transfer data in large, efficient, streamable chunks.
>
>
>
> You want vm.dirty_bytes enough higher than your first number so that
> your hardware has enough time to spin up and transfer data before you
> put the hammer down and say, "all right, nobody else gets to queue
> writes until all the waiting data has reached disk."
>
>
>
> You want vm.dirty_bytes *low* enough that when you *do* have to put that
> hammer down, it doesn't interfere with your perceptions of a responsive
> system. (And in a server context, you want it low enough that things
> can't time out--or be pushed into timing out--waiting for it. Call your
> user attention a matter of timing out expecting things to respond to
> you, and the same principle applies...)
>
>
>
> Now, vm.swappiness? That's a weighting factor for how quickly the kernel
> should try moving memory to swap to be able to speedily respond to new
> allocations. Me, I prefer the kernel to not preemptively move
> lesser-used data to swap, because that's going to be a few hundred
> megabytes worth of data all associated with one application, and it'll
> be a real drag when I switch back to the application I haven't used for
> half an hour. So I set vm.swappiness to 0, to tell the kernel to only
> move data to swap if it has no other alternative while trying to satisfy
> a new memory allocation request.


OK, OK, OK. I need to read a bit about these. Any references or docs or 
is the result of parsing out what is the least painful for a 
workstation? I do not run any heavy databases on my workstation; they
are only there to hack on them. I test db centric stuff on domain 
servers, sometimes with limited resources. I run lxde and I'm moving to 
lxqt for workstations and humanoid (terminal) IO.


Do you set these differently for servers?

Nodes in a cluster?

I use OpenRC, just so you know. I also have a motherboard with IOMMU 
that is currently has questionable settings in the kernel config file. I 
cannot find consensus if/how IOMMU that affects IO with the Sata HD 
devices versus mm mapped peripherals.... in the context of 4.x kernel 
options. I'm trying very hard here to avoid a deep dive on these issues, 
so trendy strategies are most welcome, as workstation and cluster node 
optimizations are all I'm really working on atm.


THANKS (as always)!

James