rawhide slow like a snail because of kernel debugging?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:07:16 -0600, Mike Chambers wrote:

> > It has begun some weeks ago in rawhide and is the same in F9 Alpha,
> > which I installed from jigdo CD images.
> > 
> > The entire system is slow whatever it does. Loadavg jumps up
> > quickly. When running a simple yum update, loadavg goes above 6. User
> > processes don't seem to get as much cpu power as would be possible.
> > Windows take seconds to open. The GNOME Desktop is not as responsive
> > as in F8 either. Opening dialogs, clicking buttons, there seems to be
> > a penalty on everything. It's unbearable. Testing rawhide or F9 is no
> > fun at all. Why is this? I remember that during Fedora Core test
> > releases various kernel debugging features are enabled. Is this the
> > reason also this time? Has it become much more cpu power hungry than
> > e.g. with FC7 and older?
> 
> I have to agree as I experience the same thing.  *Sometimes* it is a
> little faster, but most often than not, it's slowww for most things.
> Like I even mentioned in the install observations, the rpm install
> itself took 2 hours or better to finish.

[copied from another thread]

> havce you went to your services gui (or text
> mode if that slow) and stopped/started services you don't need?  I do
> that right after, even on tests and seems to help speed things up quite
> a bit. Some service(s) that is started on installs always seem to slow
> it down to a crawl initially until I stop quite a few that I don't need.

My F8 desktop is reduced like that quite a bit,

  $ chkconfig --list|grep :on|wc -l
  23

but my F9 Alpha installation was _just_ "GNOME Desktop" and no other
groups checked. The dependency resolver pulled in OpenOffice and several
other things that weren't selected, but in total it installed only ~950
rpms (from discs 1,2 and only a few pkgs from 3,5).

That doesn't include many default services, which would be busy working on
something in the background. Service daemons which sleep most of the time
don't slow down a system that much.

SELinux is disabled. And in rawhide I think I had disabled several
services before. It's also not due to background jobs like whatis or
mlocate.

The symptoms are that all processes have a high average time of service.
In the system monitor, the dark blue user processes don't seem to get as
much cpu time as with F8. Everything takes significantly longer than with
F8. Leave aside the boot process for now, it starts with an awfully
flickering gdm dialog that, when choosing a user name, reduces its login
dialog size in several steps with the speed of a Commodore 64. The slim
default GNOME desktop loads visibly longer than an F8 desktop with several
panel applets. Mouse-clicks are not recognised immediately. Applications
(also tiny ones like xterm) take long to load (not just the first time).
It's no surprise when the load average jumps up so quickly. Without
measuring the time, updating the F9 Alpha with yum and its 652 update
steps took more than two hours, too. That can be confirmed with yum.log.
Yesterday's 17 updates took more than 4 minutes to install.

Anyway, under such circumstances it's not attractive enough for daily
evaluation. It's no match against F8.