[Sussex] New distro install (Mandriva 2006) problems - where too start?

Steve Dobson steve at dobson.org
Sat Dec 10 06:47:55 UTC 2005


John

On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 05:26:26AM +0000, John D. wrote:
> Thomas Adam wrote:
> >So -- the computer is having to do lots od tasks.   How is this unusual?
> >What you haven't said is what program you're using  (Is
> >Man{driva,drake,whatever} still using DraxConf as an interface for this?
> > 
> >
> Don't quite follow Thomas. With for example, the software manager and 
> maybe firefox, or patience, swapping between windows is when the slow 
> redrawing shows up - It doesn't have to be any particular app or 
> combination of apps. Plus the slow screen redraw also shows at the 
> taskbar sometimes. There seems to be no corrolation as to when the 
> cursor becomes "jerky" other than that I've done "something" like click 
> a button or scrolled a page.

What Thomas was saying, with out knowing your setup, that your computer
was busy.  He assumed that there were processes running (maybe not
GUI ones) that were taking up CPU.  Now you say that you are not doing
much - so the problem is probably else where - ie. not a busy system.

> >Desmond Armstrong wrote:
> >Please open a terminal window and then type su enter the root password 
> >and then type 'top' and enter.
> >I have had the same problem but because of the extreme slowness I was 
> >not able to establish the culprit.
> >Please report back the top cpu hoggers.
> >You may also go into the uninstall and remove 'kat'. This shows as 
> >'kded' in top.
> >I suspect the problem is with xorg so I look forward to your findings.
> >With the machine I did I resorted to Mandriva 2005 and that runs very 
> >well, but, I need to know what the problem is. Some information from 
> >you and I shall retry Mandriva 2006.
> >Otherwise I am having great success with Mandriva2006
> >What is your processor speed and how much RAM do you have? 
> 
> The "top" command gave me this

I'll break the various output values from "top(1)"

> >top - 05:19:19 up 12:42,  3 users,  load average: 0.29, 0.15, 0.05

This is just a overview line - 
   3 users logged in (your graphic shell and two command lines at a guess)

> >Tasks: 101 total,   1 running, 100 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

A total of 101 task/jobs/processes running (inc some kernel threads)

> >Cpu(s):  1.0% us, 13.1% sy,  2.9% ni, 50.9% id, 31.4% wa,  0.4% hi,  0.3% si

Info about how the CPU is splitting up its time between the various
jobs:
    us - Time spent running user processes (like your patience game or
	   firefox
    sy - Time spent running system stuff (like getting data from disk
	   or the network - this generally should be lower the user
	   time - it is not - I am worried.
    ni - Niced process time (a "nice"d process is one that has said
	   "I'm not important so only run me if you have nothing
	   better to do" - not much load there - see also idle
    id - Idle time - the time the CPU had nothing to do, not even
	   low priority stuff.
    wa - Waiting for I/O - the amount of time the CPU was waiting for
	   disk - This is way to high on your machine - something
	   to look into.
    hi/si - Can't remember o the top of my head

> >Mem:    775504k total,   272108k used,   503396k free,    23876k buffers
> >Swap:  1469936k total,   101608k used,  1368328k free,   146008k cached

Summary of your memory usage physical and swap.  Most of it is
free so no problems there

Below is a break down of the tasks running.  The only one that is
registering any CPU time is X - given the summary above I would
suggest that this is a sick system.

> >  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> > 3779 root      15   0 88784 7680 2076 S  7.9  1.0   5:59.61 X
> >    1 root      16   0  1564   76   56 S  0.0  0.0   0:38.24 init
> >    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
> >    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.05 events/0
> >    4 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
> >    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
> >    7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
> >   84 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:24.39 kblockd/0
> >  119 root      17  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
> >  118 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   5:59.67 kswapd0
> >  708 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kseriod
> >  790 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:13.43 kjournald
> >  932 root      21  -4  1564    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.10 udevd
> > 1271 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd
> > 1730 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.68 kjournald
> > 2734 root      16   0  1584   56   32 S  0.0  0.0   1:43.91 ifplugd
> > 2824 rpc       16   0  1688    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 portmap
> > 2848 root      16   0  1608  196  132 S  0.0  0.0   0:09.34 syslogd
> > 2860 root      16   0  2336  172  124 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.95 klogd
> > 2912 root      16   0  1552    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 acpid
> > 2958 root      20   0  1696    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rpc.statd
> > 3052 root      16   0  5484  460  324 S  0.0  0.1   1:28.14 cupsd
> > 3462 xfs       16   0  3996  344  148 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.01 xfs
> > 3487 messageb  16   0  2224    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 dbus-daemon-1
> > 3512 root      17   0  4040  388  180 S  0.0  0.1   3:51.30 hald
> > 3605 root      16   0  1832    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 mandi
> > 3753 root      17   0  2612  196  152 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdm
> > 3754 root      16   0  2800  300  232 S  0.0  0.0   4:04.43 nifd
> > 3864 nobody    18   0 11424   96   68 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.11 mDNSResponder
> > 3890 daemon    16   0  1688  100   68 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.12 atd
> > 3933 root      18   0  4276    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sshd
> > 3999 root      20   0  2148    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 xinetd
> > 4074 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 nfsd
> > 4075 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 nfsd
> > 4076 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 nfsd
> > 4077 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 nfsd

<rant>
  This is why I don't like some of the standard installs.  John is
  a single computer user.  So why does he need NFS running?  I there
  is another computer in his house I will probably be running Windows
  so who has he got to share with?
</rant>

> Obviously I'm not familiar with that type of output, so don't know if 
> that tells me/us/you if anything is particularly "sinful".

See above.

> My pc has a 2 gig pentium 4 chip and 768 megs of ram installed.

My laptop (that I'm working on now) is only a 1.13GHz with 128MB
and top gives me:
Cpu(s):  9.1% us,  1.3% sy,  0.0% ni, 87.6% id,  1.6% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si

and I sometimes get summaries like this (the system is doing almost
nothing):

Cpu(s):  6.5% us,  0.6% sy,  0.0% ni, 92.5% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si

But this is a laptop and therefore has a SLOW laptop disk and I some
times see likes like this:

Cpu(s):  6.2% us,  6.9% sy, 11.8% ni, 43.6% id, 31.1% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si

This is like yours - high "Wait or Disk" number compared to "user/system"
CPU times.  But this type of summary is a rare event - so I do not 
worry - and I expected it because I have very slow disks.

You might have just copied an odd bad line when your system at a very
brief peek at disk activity.  This happens.  top(1) is something that
you should what and see how the system changes over time.  Of more help
in an e-mail is vmstat(8) which reports a number of samples of the system.
Try the following:- 

$ vmstat 5 10
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 0  0  97424   7512     40  85020    2    4    14    13    3   463  7  1 91  0
 0  0  97424   7396     40  85020    0    0     0     0 1001   190  1  0 99  0
 0  0  97424   7388     40  85020    0    0     0     0 1001   195  1  0 99  0
 0  0  97424   7388     40  85020    0    0     0     0 1001   198  1  0 99  0
 0  0  97424   7380     40  85020    0    0     0     0 1162   374  3  1 96  0
 0  0  97424   7404     40  85020    0    0     0     0 1028   503  1  1 98  0
 0  0  97424   7388     40  85020    0    0     0     2 1020   437  2  0 98  0
 0  0  97424   7388     40  85028    0    0     2    29 1026   460  2  0 98  0
 0  0  97424   7388     40  85028    0    0     0     0 1018   465  2  0 98  0
 0  0  97424   7404     40  85028    0    0     0     5 1160   355  3  1 96  0

> As I say, I've never experienced anything like this with any other 
> distro - so I have to presume that it's something to do with this 
> version of Mandriva. I've not selected/installed anything other than the 
> default offerings and a few extra kde bits (the card games etc).

It may be that you have a problem with your disks or (more likly) that
your graphics system is not configured right - that you're not getting
full performance from the graphics hardware.

To check out the disk please report the output of:

$ dmesg | tail -20

This will give us the last 20 kernel messages - if a disk has problems
it should (?) show up there.

If the problem is graphics then the output logs from the Xserver is
what is needed.  Have a look for a file like /var/log/Xorg.0.log or
/var/log/XFree86.0.log.  It'll be big so send it to me personally
as an attachment.  Also send me the output of "lspci -v"

Steve
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