Linux desktop sluggish over time

[ted leslie]

i have noticed this at times with some distros,
things to watch out for:

vmware running a windows virtual OS .. windows can go off and do some crazy ass things, and maybe vmware is being tricked up to

vm swapping, especially if a app is leaking memory.

beagle and other search applications running in the background.

flash in firefox, flash sux large! can't wait till mono/moonlight stomps it out, flash is generaly the main thing
that kill linux in performance, and in ability to get ahead on the desktop

one day i read a article about settings of hinting, and font quality, and went into my setting,
and max'd out everything on hinting and quality .. and yeah it looked better .. then i forgot i did that.
A few days went by, sort of noticed a few apps lagging, got really bad,
this font quality, mixed with large OO files (xls, doc, etc), on the desktop, with virtual desktops, 
doing flipping back and forth, and with overlayed windows, seems to trigger a tonne of unnecessary 
redraws in the app, and sometimes your not aware of it. There is some settings in the xorg.conf file
for font cache type things on nvidia chipset that help. 

aside from top and other monitoring, be aware of sys% in tasks, also flash drives have bitten me in the past to, causing weird slow downs,
but the newer highspeed ones certainly don't.

check vmstat for IN's and CS's getting crasy, in fact run  "vmstat 1" and log it, when your system is good, nd when its bad and look for diff's


-tl

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:16:05 -0600
Marc Lanctot <lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> 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.
> 
> Thanks,
> Marc
> 
> -- 
> Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice
> is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine
> theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.
>    -- Anonymous
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-- 
ted leslie <tleslie-RBVUpeUoHUc at public.gmane.org>
--
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