Linux desktop sluggish over time

[cameron lord]

Cameron Lord Replied:

Ive noticed that too on fedora abd Kubuntu, but not xubuntu or Mepis
It goes away if you remove all netscape based applications and librarys

They act like a fresh install!...sometimes :P

For some reson that dosent happen at all when running Fedora on a virtual pc under

windows, is this because the ram is still managed by windows?

 

--

Cameron Lord (AXCellsecure #1 in secure communications)

 
> Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 15:58:31 -0400
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Linux desktop sluggish over time
> From: lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
> 
> 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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