On Monday, December 20, 2010 08:00:36 pm Joseph Apuzzo wrote: > The one thing I can think of is when a disk runs out of room it shows down > because it becomes harder and harder to find a place to put new data. How > full is your disk? There is iozone for benchmarking Disk IO but without the > original IO speeds it would be almost impossible to tell if there is an > issue.
It's still possible to see if I/O is reasonable with something like 'iotop' as long as you're running a kernel that has I/O accounting enabled (I don't, but the default Ubuntu kernel probably does). > I would use "system monitor" and add the Disk IO graph and see if > that is the issue or is it memory or CPU. Lastly I would look at "top" in a > terminal to see what is consuming resource. I have seen background indexing > eat up 20% of the CPU and almost 40% of IO. You mean that stupid updatedb process for the 'locate' command? Or do you mean the new absolutely asinine "Desktop Serach" indexing such as nepomuk/strigi? I've found that the "Desktop Serach" indexing is a *huge* performance hog, and has several issues associated with it concerning 'inotify' watches. In particular what I saw was that simply *selecting* a list of, say, 100 files in a file browser would take more than 30 seconds to accomplish, and hanging the GUI until it finished, until I finally got sick of it and turned the "Desktop Search" features completely off. And after I did that I found that the database for the Desktop Search features was over 1 GiB in size, which has to be manually cleaned/removed. :-/ It's no wonder I was having performance problems there. So yeah, with newer systems there are some things that can run *much* slower, unfortunately. And yes, this is something that caused gradual speed degradation on my system, just as Kris describes. Eventually I traced it down to 'nepomuk' by running 'top' during performance lags. > Good practice is to empty the apt cache of old deb updates with "sudo > apt-get auto-clean" and or "sudo apt-get clean" Cleaning the apt-get cache of packages is a good idea and can gain back a lot of free space after major upgrades or on systems that get lots of updates over time... but other than eating space the apt-get cache doesn't cause consistent performance problems like are being described. > There are many hints and tricks around on cleaning up Ubuntu/Debian > systems. Anything you'd recommend beyond the "sudo apt-get clean" after using the package manager? I can't think of anything else other than that. [And turning OFF the "Desktop Search" performance hogging features.] -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] > On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Kristoffer Walker > > <[email protected]>wrote: > > I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (desktop) a couple of months ago and have > > seen my performance drop ever since. It is now getting to the point > > that it is becoming unacceptable. From all my observations it seems > > like disk IO is creating the bottleneck. > > > > I only thing I did majorly different was to install the entire distro > > on one disk partition (I've broken it up over 4 partitions in the > > past). My swap partition is the same size it's always been. > > > > Any ideas how I might isolate the problem, or at least be able to get > > some actual data that would indicate that disk IO is indeed my issue? > > > > - Kris Walker _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jan 5 - Building a Community Site with Drupal Feb 2 - Zimbra Mar 2 - MHVLUG 8th Anniversary - Show and Tell
