Patterned slow-down over the entire GNOME desktop

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Tue Jan 3 09:17:25 UTC 2006


On Lun 2 janvier 2006 23:38, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> darrell pfeifer wrote:
>>> I have a two year old laptop that uses the radeon driver.
>>>
>>> The last few kernels from rawhide left a really sluggish response.
>>> Switching between virtual screens gave a really noticeable repaint. I
>>> also had the feeling that I/O in general was very slow.
>>>
>>> The latest 1806 kernel is much better, so this might not be an X
>>> problem.
>>
>> My feeling was more some sort of scheduler problem, with apps being
>> randomly starved. As long as you stayed in the same app everything was
>> very fast, trying to switch or launch a new app would either be
>> reasonably fast of slow as hell. Starvation was not linked to any
>> particular app, more (like Ivan noted) to launch ordering.
>>
>> I never noticed any particular load peak that could explain the
>> slowdowns. And this box had 256 MB which is not bad for its generation
>> and the only reason it can still be used.
> But see...those are all GUI apps.

Yep CLI is not affected.

> More specifically, they're all gtk apps.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a kernel issue affect all apps on
> the system - it doesn't appear that way to me. Also, I don't know if
> this is relevant, but if you compare `strace -c` on a fast and slow run,
> they look almost exactly the same syscall distribution, and cover a very
> small amount of total time (1 sec).
>
> I was particularly interested in bittorrent, as a simple test case -
> doesn't it only link to gtk2 over pygtk2? We know python isn't the
> issue, since C apps are slow too.
>
> However... this is interesting. I observe no slowdown as root - all the
> apps start reasonably fast. Can you confirm this?

Not before quite a long time - won't even touch the slow system for a few
months.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot




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