Intel(r) Core?2 Duo Processors"

[John Wendel]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 13/10/06, John Wendel <john.wendel at metnet.navy.mil> wrote:
>> Tony Nelson wrote:
>> > At 12:28 AM +0200 10/13/06, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> >> On 12/10/06, Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
>> >>> I have a Athlon 1.2 GHz 512 MB and it is not slow on FC5, though 
>> I'm not
>> >>> running the same mix as you are.  I think possibly something is 
>> not right
>> >>> on your system.  Does top show a high load, or indicate that the 
>> system is
>> >>> swapping?  Perhaps the disks are fragmented -- EXT2/3 data 
>> structures don't
>> >>> suffer much from fragmentation, but the file data does.
>> >> This is top:
>> >>
>> >> top - 00:26:49 up 15:35,  1 user,  load average: 0.77, 0.61, 0.67
>> >
>> > Load seems low enough.
>> >
>> >> Tasks: 110 total,   1 running, 109 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
>> >> Cpu(s):  2.7% us,  0.7% sy,  0.0% ni, 96.3% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% 
>> hi,  0.0% si
>> >> Mem:   1002168k total,   952200k used,    49968k free,    42264k 
>> buffers
>> >> Swap:  1413648k total,    18460k used,  1395188k free,   575176k 
>> cached
>> >
>> > Not using much swap.
>> >
>> >>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>> >> 4433 root      15   0 98.6m  56m 4944 S  1.3  5.8 347:19.29 Xorg
>> >> 10572 dotancoh  16   0 32148  15m  11m S  1.0  1.6   0:01.07 konsole
>> >> 4829 dotancoh  15   0 25544 3684 1752 S  0.7  0.4   2:02.78 dcopserver
>> >> 5298 dotancoh  15   0 37460  22m  16m S  0.3  2.3   2:58.72 kicker
>> >> 10574 dotancoh  16   0  2192 1112  856 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.05 top
>> >>    1 root      16   0  1568  532  460 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.46 init
>> >>    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 
>> migration/0
>> >>    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 
>> ksoftirqd/0
>> >>    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
>> >>    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.34 events/0
>> >>    6 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 khelper
>> >>    7 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
>> >>    9 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.16 kblockd/0
>> >>   10 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
>> >>  105 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.24 pdflush
>> >>  106 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.76 pdflush
>> >>  108 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
>> >>
>> >> How can I check fragmentation. Googling the subject makes me beleive
>> >> that this is not the case in general with Linux.
>> >
>> > The common wisdom is that EXT2/3 are not affected by fragmentation, but
>> > without much real-world proof that this is so.  The EXT2/3 filesystem
>> > metadata was designed to be not much affected by fragmentation, but 
>> that
>> > says little about the file data.  I read an article / webpage (that 
>> I can't
>> > find right now) by someone who decided to experiment with new and 
>> used EXT2
>> > filesystems, and found a substatial slowdown.  He was inspired to 
>> try this
>> > because he noticed that his computer sped up when given a fresh 
>> filesystem.
>> > You could try backing up and restoring to a fresh filesystem.  If you
>> > spring for a new computer you'll back up and restore to the new 
>> computer.
>> > Either way you'll get a fresh new filesystem.
>>
>>
>> Look at the Xorg Time. Doesn't 347:19.29 with an uptime of 15:35 seem
>> extremely high? On my box, X uses about 4 minutes / hour of uptime.
>>
>> And the load averages on most of the desktops I use are mostly in the
>> 0.1 - 0.3 range. This box has something eating CPU. I don't think the
>> file system is the problem.
> 
> Thanks, John. What would be a first good step to diagnos this?
> 
> Dotan Cohen
> 
> http://english-lyrics.com/
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> 

I wish I had a good answer for you, since it's something I'd also like 
to know. I usually just look for busy processes with top or ps.

KDE has a performance tool (ksysguard) that is loaded with stuff (too 
much stuff). I'm sure Gnome has something equivalent. The problem is 
knowing what parts are interesting.

iostat, vmstat and sar are tools that might be useful, but the 
learning curve is a little steep.

Maybe a performance guru on the list could jump in with some help.

Regards,

John