[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
Did the above mentioned fix apply to you? Do you still have this problem? ** Changed in: linux-source-2.6.17 (Ubuntu) Status: New = Incomplete -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/73887 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
I believe it was a problem with my swap being disabled after the upgrade, this is not relevant anymore ** Changed in: linux-source-2.6.17 (Ubuntu) Status: Incomplete = Invalid -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/73887 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
My take on this is a lot easier. Linux does not work well if you don't give it a swap device, pretty much regardless of the size of your RAM. This explains why you experience stability problems even though you have plenty of memory. Assuming you did have a swap device on dapper, this is most likely a duplicate of #66637. See that bug as to how to make it work again (mkswap your swap device, put the newly generated UUID into the swap slot in /etc/fstab). -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://launchpad.net/bugs/73887 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
I am quite a beginner, but I can explain some of what I have learned so far. I cannot tell what is happening in your case for sure, but I can give you some ideas how to check it: - Check with KSystemGuard (you can find it in Start-System, most probably you know already and I am explaining too much... :-)). There you can see the memory usage, including the swap. If you check the Physical memory, you can see that is shared between applications, buffers and caches. This is because Linux tries to make the most use of the non-needed memory for speeding up the system. So it keeps cached the areas being accessed on the Hard Disk lately. Only the blue part belongs to the applications. Linux will shrink the cached area if the applications need more memory. So it could well be happening, that when you open more applications, then the cached area is freed and that info is writen to the Hard Disk, so that is why you have heavier use of the disk on those moments, but this should only last for a while and stop after the new applications are opened. You can monitor the evolution of the memory use yourself and see the behaviour in your system. - I don't know how it is really meassured the total load. It can be a combination of the CPU use and Memory use. So if you are running out of memory and there is no swap memory, the load maybe can get that high. I am just guessing. Maybe after installing the swap your load will get lower, since the total amount if virtual memory will be much higher. Good luck. -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://launchpad.net/bugs/73887 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
When checking your kern.log, it can be seen that the amount of swap is 0!! So it seems you don't have swap partition or file mounted. You may check it with swapon -s, if nothing is returned it means you have to check why the swap is not mounted. You can check the last lines of /var/log/messages to get some info. Give a try to fix this first. Actually in my case the kernel uses voluntary-preemtion (it seems to be the default in the default generic kernel) and kaffeine seems to work better this way. I have compiled the kernel with preemption instead of voluntary-preemption and I get small troubles with the multimedia applications, so I went back to voluntary-preemption and I have no complaints. If you use full preemption, since the low priority processes need to be kicked out often from the processor, this means that the total performance will be little bit lower. Since your system has only 1 processor, and if you are interested in recompiling the kernel you can get the system a slightly smoother by recompiling the kernel with out SMP (Symetric Multiprocessing, enabled by default on the generic kernel). If you disable SMP then you need to enable Local APIC support on uniprocessors (which is just 2 or 3 lines below when using sudo make menuconfig. I am running Linux in a external USB disk, so I have no possibilities of having DMA. But I noticed some improvements when the disk is swapping if I set SWAP_TOKEN_TIMEOUT=50 (or even 25) in the file thrash.c (which belongs to the kernel sources and usually in /usr/src/linux- source.../mm/), and then recompile the kernel. It seems that the swap does not work so well if you don't have DMA enabled. In normal cases this should not be needed, but if someone is running Ubuntu in an USB HD this may help. I have a 2GHz CPU and 1GB of memory, and the system is running even better than in dapper. I think if you fix the swap thing you will notice it also. Hope it helps. -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://launchpad.net/bugs/73887 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
Thank you very much for your clever remarks. You're right, I am not using a swap partition according to `swapon -s'. I didn't know this (because I have one set up at hda1). So I'm only using my 472mb ram (512 minus onboard mem). But this actually means that Ubuntu is using much more memory than I though it did. And it doesn't really explain why sometimes my load rises above 6.00... if Linux is out of memory it just kills a process right? And why is my harddisk freaking out in activity when my load rises so high? I don't really understand that :-) If anyone has suggestions I'd love to hear it. In the meantime I'll activate my swap and see what it does. -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://launchpad.net/bugs/73887 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 73887] Re: Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well
** Attachment added: kern.log http://librarian.launchpad.net/5216359/kern.log ** Description changed: Binary package hint: linux-source-2.6.17 Since I upgraded Dapper to Edgy, I'm having serious problems when I'm running multiple apps in Gnome. I even consider downgrading to Dapper, but I hope it's not necessary. I have an Athlon XP 2200+ CPU with 512mb RAM. In Dapper this was great, but now it feels like I'm running with 128MB; When switching between apps, especially when there's also some CPU load, my harddisk is very busy (as if it is swapping) and the user interface responds slow. Often I had to kill firefox from tty1 because my load rose above 6.00. Some other times firefox or GDM was killed automatically (See the attached kern.log, Out of Memory messages). Also see why did Ubuntu turn off kernel preemption in Edgy? at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-November/022769.html - , maybe it's the same problem. + , maybe it's a related problem. What can this be? Edgy doesn't need that more resources than Dapper, does it? What can I do? I consider this a serious regression. -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://launchpad.net/bugs/73887 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
