On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 09:33:21PM +1100, Andrew Greig wrote:
> I have peace of mind about the ECC or not issue. I have a machine which
> boots slowly compared with even ten years ago. One needs to boot it up and
> then log in, and go and make a cup of coffee have a chat with a friend over
> the phone, and then it may be ready to perform,
What are you running on that machine? and how much RAM does it have? And does
the motherboard have any RAM slots free? if so, upgrading RAM is still the
single best and cheapest way to improve performance on most machines. IIRC
your machine is fairly old, so it takes DDR-3 RAM rather than the newer DDR-4.
A 4GB DDR-3 stick is about $36 these days. An 8GB DDR-3 stick is about $65.
You should upgrade RAM in pairs, so either 2x4GB or 2x8GB.
Are you running systemd? if so, have you tried running 'systemd-analyse blame'
to see where the boot delays are ocurring?
Are you running something that scans the entire drive on every boot? something
like the ancient gnome beagle or kde's nepomuk or baloo?
> but it still takes a minute to load the first web page over a high speed
> cable connection.
Are you running firefox or chromium? both of them are RAM hogs, but chromium
is much worse - it uses several times more RAM than firefox to display the
same or fewer number of tabs.
does your internet connection gets started automatically on boot, or only on
demand when something (like your web browser) tries to connect to somewhere on
the internet?
are you running a local DNS cache? or a web proxy cache? A local DNS caching
resolver is **definitely** worth having. A web proxy, may be worth having if
you vist the same sites repeatedly or if there are any other computers on the
network visiting the same sites.
> 20 seconds to open the file manager, about the same to open
> Thunderbird. Boot times are becoming a bit like Microsoft 's BSOD used to
> be, an unfortunate fact of life.
that sounds like a combination of insufficient RAM, and slow swapping.
> I am still unsure how to use gparted to get the disks recognised by the
> system. I can hot plug them and the system will not crash, but if I try to
> boot with them connected it will fail to boot.
Try it again without the "quiet splash" options in the grub boot entry. Ubuntu
adds these annoying options to hide the nasty horrible text that shows what is
happening when the machine boots and replace it with a pretty but completely
useless and uninformative graphical logo. Yay. Most of the time, you don't
need to see the kernel boot up messages...but when you DO need them, there is
no subsitute for them. IMO, it's criminal negligence to hide them away as if
they're some dirty little secret rather than vital diagnostic information.
Without this information, it's very hard to figure out what the problem is.
Anyway, ignoring my rant, instead of hitting enter or waiting for grub to time
out, hit "e" to edit the grub entry. look for the line with "quiet splash" on
it and remove those two options.
Hit F10 or Ctrl-X to boot. This change is not permanent, it only affects the
current boot.
Alternatively, choosing the "recovery mode" option from the grub menu may give
you the same result. It should also give you a password prompt to get a root
shell which you can use to investigate and fix the problem (you will need to
run "mount -o remount,rw /" to be able to edit the root fs).
Another alternative:
0. make a backup copy of your grub default file. e.g.:
sudo cp -a /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.20190220
1. sudo vi /etc/default/grub (or use nano or whatever your favourite editor is)
2. remove "quiet" and "splash" from wherever they occur (either or both of
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX)
3. Uncomment the "#GRUB_TERMINAL=console" line by removing the # at the start.
4. save and exit
5. sudo update-grub
This will get rid of the "quiet splash" options permanently.
> My /etc/fstab file has little information to copy, which is why I feel that
> a new build may be the best way forward for me.
If you do that, then IMO you should seriously consider the following:
1. Upgrade the RAM in your machine to the maximum it will take. 16GB or more.
In fact, you should do this anyway even if you don't rebuild the system.
2. Buying a smallish (128 to 256 GB) SSD for the boot drive and swap space.
Optionally buy a second identical one so you can have RAID-1. Use the two 3TB
drives in RAID-1 (with mdadm or btrfs) for bulk storage (the old 1TB drive is
ancient and should be probably be retired. or reformatted and used only for
temporary scratch space after you've copied your old files from it)
If you're going to upgrade your RAM, it may also be worth upgrading the
motherboard and CPU to something that can take DDR-4 RAM (a 16GB kit of 2x8GB
DDR-4 starts from around $160, and because DDR-4 is readily available in much
larger sizes than DDR-3 is easily upgraded all the way to 64GB or more).
A new CPU will be faster than what you currently have and will have lots of
potential for future upgrades. e.g. a Ryzen 5 2600X (~ $330) or Ryzen 7 2700X
(~ $515) CPU, and a motherboard to match (X370 motherboards start from around
$130, X470 from around $200). Doing this would cost at least $500 or more on
top the new/extra RAM - but buying DDR-3 RAM is kind of throwing money away
on obsolete technology that is on the verge of disappearing from the market
entirely, while DDR-4 will still be in active use for at least another 5 or 10
years.
(the cost of replacing the DDR-3 RAM in most of my machines with DDR-4 is the
main reason I haven't upgraded all my Phenom and FX CPUs to Ryzen....if i had
to upgrade the RAM anyway, I'd upgrade them to Ryzen at the same time).
Modern motherboards also have NVME slots for extremely fast SSDs. SATA SSDs
max out at around 550 MB/s, limited by the SATA bus. NVME SSDs run at 4x PCI-e
speed and can get up to around 3200 MB/s. They cost about the same as SATA
SSDs.
> I have 65Gb of space left on my 1TB drive and with several photo shoots on
> the books for the next two weeks it will fill and grind to a halt, so I need
> to apply myself to get the outcome.
Most filesytems slow down when they get over about 90% full, but what you're
reporting seems excessive even for that. It's certainly contributing to the
performance problems.
Maybe try moving a couple of hundred GB to another drive. One of your new
3TB drives will do. Or use 1 or 2 USB flash drive (128G USB flash drives are
under $50 these days. 256GB are under $90).
once you've freed up some space, you'll probably want to defrag the
filesystem. here's some useful info about defragging ext4:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/221079/how-to-defrag-an-ext4-filesystem
defragging ext4 usually isn't necessary, but once it gets that close to full,
it WILL be horribly fragmented.
craig
--
craig sanders <[email protected]>
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