[Gllug] Re: Memory usage

Tethys sta296 at astradyne.co.uk
Thu Oct 13 21:06:18 UTC 2005


Peter Grandi writes:

>On a 3GHz CPU, a user CPU time of 9 seconds is extremely
>worrying, and the 3 seconds of system CPU time are simply
>insane...

But very repeatable:

	leto:~% time ooffice 
	javaldx: Could not find a Java Runtime Environment! 

	real    0m23.808s
	user    0m9.980s
	sys     0m3.369s
	leto:~% time ooffice 
	javaldx: Could not find a Java Runtime Environment! 

	real    0m13.225s
	user    0m9.712s
	sys     0m3.213s

>* Investigate, especially if your CPU is HT, whether you have an
>  older kernel with a scheduler that does not support sticky
>  affinity; try to boot a non SMP kernel.

Yes, it's a hyperthreaded CPU. But then I'm running 2.6.11, so it
should be well aware of the hyperthreading for scheduling purposes.

>* Use a production build of OOo 1.1.5, freshly installed. If you
>  have a debug build it may be slower, however not in the
>  appalling measure above.

Nope. OO.o comes as 1.9.125 with FC4 and I really don't care enough
to recompile it or even download another precompiled binary. It's a
hideous, broken application, and I'm not going to waste my valuable
time trying to find out what's wrong with it, particularly when there
are valid alternatives available.

>Uhm, but they are not frameworks/suites. Also, the CPU times
>above indicate something is wrong with your system indeed.

Not my problem. If I want a word processor, I'm not prepared to
put up with crappy performance just because the developers chose
to implement it as a "framework/suite". I just want to write a
document[1]. Again, if something was wrong with my system, I'd
expect to see the same sort of problems with all applications,
not just OO.o.

>But starting an empty-age Writer does few accesses to the home dir,
>almost all are accesses to OOo's own files and bits in the system
>dirs, and I hope you don't have those on NFS.

No, they're on local disk. But even if they weren't, it shouldn't be a
problem. I run many apps entirely from NFS mounted install directories,
such as my web browser, MUA and window manager. Furthermore I have in
the past run *everything* over NFS on diskless machines without seeing
the hideous performance problems that OO.o is showing.

Note that your other suggestion (tweaking the filesystem) will soon be
put to the test. My hard drive has been giving SMART errors, so I'll
be replacing it with a new one and a fresh install (and hence a fresh
filesystem). I'd be surprised if it has a noticable effect on the
performance of OO.o, but I have an open mind, and will know soon enough.

Tet

[1] Actually, if I want to do that, I'll be using vi. I only use a
    word processor to read MS Word docs that misguided fools have
    sent me by email.
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