Linux desktop sluggish over time

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Jun 5 19:58:31 UTC 2009


On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 12:16:05PM -0600, Marc Lanctot wrote:
> Considering my experience with Linux this seems to be a problem a should  
> have fixed by now, but it's an problem I'm growing particularly annoyed  
> with.
>
> I notice that over time Linux desktops I use tend to get sluggish. I  
> know this is true for at least Ubuntu and Fedorah. I don't remember  
> feeling it as much on Debian, but it's been a while.
>
> Anyway, here goes. Sometimes I leave my home Ubuntu machine on for a  
> while; I'm talking like 2-3 weeks, maybe more. Sometimes I run  
> CPU-intensive apps for a few hours, then leave it idle for days. It just  
> seems like over time, the machine gets increasingly unresponsive. After  
> rebooting and opening up Thunderbird, the new message window pops up  
> right away. After several weeks it takes twice the amount of time or  
> more. And, while I thought maybe the GUI/X/Video Driver (nVidia Quadro  
> NVS 290) might be to blame, the sluggishness is noticeable even when I  
> ssh into my machine from outside.. so it's not just GUI response time.  
> But sometimes the problem is less noticeable if I restart X, so ..
>
> We're talking about a new Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.0 GHz with 4 GB of RAM.
>
> For a while I suspected Gnome was the culprit. Could it be? This seems  
> way less noticeable when I use fluxbox, but alas, I need a user-friendly  
> desktop for the girlfriend.
>
> I suspect this may be due to processes left open that consume most of  
> memory but the problem persists even after killing some of those large  
> processes.
>
> I know for a fact that Ubuntu comes with a lot of little trinkets that  
> are spiffy and supposed to make "Linux easier to use" or more modern but  
> sometimes they can slow the machine down. Compiz, for example, is a  
> culprit. Pulseaudio too. *But* even after removing these unneeded apps  
> the problem still happens.
>
> So, to my question... does anybody know what is going on here and has  
> been through similar trouble? I suspect that it is memory/virtual memory  
> related.. like, over time the OS doesn't handle memory management as  
> well by default, but if I set a few flags this will all magically  
> change. I don't want to take the easy way out and just reboot; I want to  
> understand what the problem is.
>
> Linux's performance is one of the main reasons I initially ditched  
> Windows (don't worry, there have been a lot of reasons since that have  
> made me stick with it), and now it seems like many distros are going the  
> "unneeded bloat" route... it makes me sad. I just hope it -- meaning my  
> particular problem -- can be fixed.

Anything from mozilla.org leaks memory, and often quite badly.  firefox 3
not as bad as 2, but still leaks.  thunderbird does too.  They share a
lot of old netscape libraries, which are likely part of the problem.

Unfortunately given the way x servers allocate memory and give it to
applications and expect them to free it can cause some issues with
leaks over time if X applications are not extremely well written, since
closing the application doesn't cause an automatic free of the memory.
Restarting the X server of course does free the memory.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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