Re: [gentoo-user] systemd

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:13:53 +0200
> Michael Schreckenbauer <grimlog@×××.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Am Dienstag, 30. August 2011, 13:56:44 schrieb Alex Schuster:
>> > Alan McKinnon writes:
>> > > On Tue 23 August 2011 18:17:17 Stroller did opine thusly:
>> > > > On 23 August 2011, at 07:27, Joost Roeleveld wrote:
>> > [...]
>> >
>> > > > > And I don't really see the point of D-BUS on a server either.
>> > > > > All the services that need to talk to each other already have
>> > > > > working communication paths.
>> > > >
>> > > > Reading that blog entry I found discouraging the idea that dbus
>> > > > might be required on my servers in the future, if systemd
>> > > > becomes popular with distros.
>> > >
>> > > What's your objection to dbus? It gives you a standard message
>> > > bus, is small, light, consumes minimal resources and provides a
>> > > nice standard way to do IPC. Probably easier than reinventing the
>> > > wheel with named pipes and other bits over and over.
>> >
>> > Except for me. dbus-daemon often uses 10-20% of my CPU according to
>> > top.
>>
>> Mine idles most of the time, no CPU is used. My computer is running
>> for ~6h now, dbus-daemon used less than 1.5s CPU time.
>>
>> > And
>> > this morning, it was using about 750M of memory. Which is less than
>> > kwin's and Kontact's usage, but still.
>>
>> Strange. Mine uses only ~20MB.
>>
>> > But I think the problem is on my side, I run KDE4 with only 8G of
>> > memory, no wonder I need 1.7G of swap right now.
>> > </rant>
>>
>> I have only 4GB of memory, run kde4, swap is not used at all most of
>> the time. There are still ~512MB free with ~1,3GB cached currently.
>> I do have programs running :) firefox with some tabs, kdevelop with a
>> project (~100.000 LOC), kmail, LibreOffice and 3 konsoles, each with
>> some tabs open. I know, I am of no help at all, but I really wonder,
>> why your numbers differ so significantly from mine.
>
> He probably has the same problem as I - something badly wrong in the
> roll-your-own config.
>
> I had a 4G Dell laptop where KDE would start and instantly consume at
> least 1.5G just for it's various bits. Akonadi, Nepomuk, Virtuoso were
> the usual culprits. Oddly, dbus would often rise to 700M (!). And
> forget about actually emerging something - the first sniff that gcc was
> running and the machine would thrash like mad and 4G swap would fill up
> in no time at all. Less sweap wasn't an option - the battery is dud so
> I needed hibernate.
>
> Sadly (or not, depending on your viewpoint), that machine died on
> Monday morning - suspect graphics card. I can't complain - it ran flat
> out 24/7/365 and I treated it like one of the servers that I could
> carry around. So I can't even troubleshoot what I configured how to
> make performance behave like it did.
>
> Happily, there was a nice pretty lady from Samsung in the office 3
> months ago wanting to sell the 900X Macbook Air knock-off into the
> company. The IT manager didn't know what to do with the demo she left
> behind so I knicked it for myself (sans paperwork of course. Makes it
> easier to prolong how long it takes to test properly) and it's running
> Ubuntu. Memory issues are a thing of the past and everything behaves
> just like it should. Even <gasp> flash.

That saddens me a little. Of all the friends and coworkers I have, I'm
the only one left using Gentoo. All of them switched to Fedora, or
Ubuntu, or OpenSuSE.

My three years old laptop runs up-to-date Gentoo with systemd, plus
the GNOME overlay so I can use GNOME 3. Absolutely everything works
with the laptop: the Wi-Fi with NetworkManager, the sound with
PulseAudio, suspend/resume, all the Fn keys, wathever. Even the
ridiculous touchstrip fingerprint sensor, though I don't really use
it.

Even more: every damn GUI program does what it should, so even though
I'm able to configure and use everything with the command line, I
don't have to, because I can use the pretty graphic programs... if at
all, 'cause nowadays everything usually "just works". And the same
it's true for all my other machines.

But I'm also aware that all of this is possible because I have the
knowledge (and the patience) to detect and fix any problem that I may
encounter when updating my machine. I don't need a robust QA from my
distribution, but I'm the exception. And this is the kind of QA
problems that make people to replace Gentoo for Ubuntu, or Fedora, or
whatever.

I whish I knew how to solve this so everybody could use Gentoo, but I
don't. I don't think I will ever use any other distro (although I've
toyed with the idea of trying exherbo), but I cannot in good
conscience recommend it to "normal" users, unless I'm willing to be
their tech support forever.

I love Gentoo, been using it since 2004, but I'm the first one to
admit it's not for everyone.

And that saddens me a little.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México