11.3 much slower than 11.2?

colbec22 · July 29, 2010, 2:23pm

I have been running opensuse 11.2 successfully on my IBM NetVista 1.8 GHz for a year or more. Response is quick, no problems.

Downloaded the DVD for 11.3 and installed it (new install replacing the / system partition but leaving /home intact, renamed /home…kde4 to .kde4old). Install was fine, but on final boot the response of 11.3 was noticeably slower than 11.2, I would estimate about half speed. I tried compiling a new kernel to see if it improved, but the kernel compile was taking for ever so I stopped it. Editing the kickoff menu was close to impossible - saving a change resulted in “Updating system configuration” which would crawl to 100% and then start over again; after the 5th iteration I cancelled it.

In fact this got so bad (slowness, odd errors) that I am in the process of restoring 11.2. This new install of 11.2 is noticeably faster again than the 11.3.

My system has a good hard drive and 1GB memory. Am I underpowered for something in 11.3? I could not figure that there was anything specifically different in 11.3 that could be disabled to restore the speed of 11.2.

oysterboy · July 29, 2010, 2:55pm

I use GNOME and have the same feeling. Boot time noticeably slower, general response time slower, opening a very simple spreadsheet with OpenOffice takes forever to display the content…

I thought that maybe the fact that I did an upgrade from 11.2 could have left me with a sub-optimal system, but I see that you did a clean install, and have the problem as well.

That’s a bit of a disappointment…

EDIT: same slowness on both my dekstop and my laptop

user · July 29, 2010, 3:29pm

On 2010-07-29 14:36, colbec wrote:

…

> In fact this got so bad (slowness, odd errors) that I am in the process
> of restoring 11.2. This new install of 11.2 is noticeably faster again
> than the 11.3.

Well… you could have waited a bit for comments, to try diagnose the cause.

> My system has a good hard drive and 1GB memory. Am I underpowered for
> something in 11.3? I could not figure that there was anything
> specifically different in 11.3 that could be disabled to restore the
> speed of 11.2.

1 GiB is not much, nowdays. Maybe the load was too much. Maybe acpi was disabled, which also means
that the system will use only one core. Maybe the system was busy indexing. Who knows… now the
question is moot, can not be investigated.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

phil524 · July 29, 2010, 3:41pm

Hi,

I have also the same feeling: Opensuse x86-64 seems much slower than opensuse 11.2 .

I have open an console and run top and i found that the programs ksortirqd/X (where X is 0 to 3) are using between 20 and 30 of the cpu ressource

asks: 217 total,   2 running, 215 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.3%us,  3.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 96.1%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:      9977M total,     2210M used,     7767M free,      127M buffers
Swap:     2055M total,        0M used,     2055M free,     1092M cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  OMMAND                                                                      
    7 root      20   0     0    0    0 R   15  0.0  30:18.64 ksoftirqd/1                                                                  
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    9  0.0  36:13.83 ksoftirqd/2                                                                  
 4824 philippe  20   0 1363m 136m  59m S    3  1.4   1:13.02 amarok                                                                       
   13 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    1  0.0  12:41.11 ksoftirqd/3                                                                  
 1718 root      20   0  254m 154m 4808 S    1  1.5   4:40.59 Xorg                                                                         
 3098 root      20   0  9136  524  396 S    0  0.0   0:04.30 irqbalance                                                                   
 3171 root      20   0 35996 1480 1080 S    0  0.0   0:31.73 atieventsd                                                                   
12543 philippe  20   0  8668 1168  788 R    0  0.0   1:20.26 top                                                                          
    1 root      20   0 12404  776  628 S    0  0.0   0:00.37 init                                                                         
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                                                                     
    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.35 migration/0                                                                  
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   7:17.93 ksoftirqd/0

on opensuse 11.2 these programs use < 0.1%
This is on HP Proliant 350 with a 4 cores processor
Can you check?
I have open a bug

Regards
Philippe

colbec22 · July 29, 2010, 3:54pm

Carlos, I apologize for not waiting for comments, however the reinstall to a working version was a critical consideration for me. It was too painful for the opensuse forums to open on that setup.

I did note that there was some kind of indexing (nepomuk?) going on and disabled it, but there was no change in overall performance. I did wait a matter of hours for the system to settle down and rebooted a number of times. Then practical considerations took priority.

I see there are a few more comments on this issue, I will watch carefully and see if there is a good reason to try 11.3 again on this machine. Otherwise it will have to wait for my brand new computer with many cores and much memory that the runes tell me that someone will gift me in the near future.

axel668 · July 29, 2010, 4:11pm

SUSE 11.3 uses a new Xorg version and switched to free graphics drivers for Nvidia and ATI. If you have an Nvidia card you can try to install the proprietary drivers (e.g. here).

Running 11.3 (KDE 32bit) on a pretty low end Intel laptop and actually think it’s pretty fast (compared to *buntu or Fedora, didn’t try SUSE 11.2 recently).

lcup · July 29, 2010, 4:57pm

Not here. I did a clean install and switched from ext3 to ext4 for my Home. 11.3 is at least as fast, if not faster.

gogalthorp · July 29, 2010, 5:28pm

I suspect a Video issue. Did you install the propritary drivers for your card, which is what???

For general info

ksoftirqd(9)

phil524 · July 29, 2010, 6:16pm

Video card is an ATI ES1000
driver used is radeon
Hwinfo output is

48: PCI 103.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)
  [Created at pci.318]
  Unique ID: kX1R.o_JrRNWqxE3
  Parent ID: 6NW+.3uJ8ax3_WfA
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:01:03.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:01:03.0
  Hardware Class: graphics card
  Model: "ATI ES1000 515E"
  Vendor: pci 0x1002 "ATI Technologies Inc"
  Device: pci 0x515e "ES1000 515E"
  SubVendor: pci 0x103c "Hewlett-Packard Company"
  SubDevice: pci 0x31fb 
  Revision: 0x02
  Memory Range: 0xf0000000-0xf7ffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  I/O Ports: 0x3000-0x30ff (rw)
  Memory Range: 0xf9ff0000-0xf9ffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xf9e00000-0xf9e1ffff (ro,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  IRQ: 23 (no events)
  I/O Ports: 0x3c0-0x3df (rw)
  Module Alias: "pci:v00001002d0000515Esv0000103Csd000031FBbc03sc00i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    XFree86 v4 Server Module: radeon
  Config Status: cfg=no, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
  Attached to: #34 (PCI bridge)

This card worked perfectly in 11.2 so I don’t see why it should give such problem in 11.3

Regards
Philippe

user · July 29, 2010, 7:06pm

On 2010-07-29 18:36, phil524 wrote:

> This card worked perfectly in 11.2 so I don’t see why it should give
> such problem in 11.3

Video handling has changed a lot in 11.3

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

user · July 29, 2010, 7:06pm

On 2010-07-29 16:06, colbec wrote:
>
> Carlos, I apologize for not waiting for comments, however the reinstall
> to a working version was a critical consideration for me. It was too
> painful for the opensuse forums to open on that setup.

I understand.

My general recommendation, specially if you need a machine to work, is not to upgrade (or install)
till about a month or two after release, after carefully scanning forums/lists. And test on an
identical machine, or at least, on a spare partition, and if not available, a live.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

colbec22 · July 29, 2010, 11:18pm

Following on from my OP, I’m having a second go at this. Only change this time around is I left the .kde4 folder intact from 11.2 and let the install process manage it.

As before, no problem getting to a working system. Still a tad slow.

Indexing - did not start up by itself this time. I think it has improved the situation a bit. Apps are still a bit slow to load, (watching the bouncing small launch icon lazily bouncing like it was on the moon).
Video - sysinfo from konqueror reports

Vendor: nVidia Corporation
Model: Vanta/Vanta LT
2D driver: nouveau
3D driver: swrast (No 3D Acceleration) (7.8.2)

I think according to the docs this needs attention. However going to the ftp site for nvidia shows the G01 and G02 files for the upscale cards but the legacy files don’t seem to be there in the same place (i586). Anybody know if these are still available?

user · July 30, 2010, 1:36am

On 2010-07-29 23:36, colbec wrote:
>
> Following on from my OP, I’m having a second go at this. Only change
> this time around is I left the .kde4 folder intact from 11.2 and let the
> install process manage it.

Too soon - but thanks for the spirit

> As before, no problem getting to a working system. Still a tad slow.
>
> 1. Indexing - did not start up by itself this time. I think it has
> improved the situation a bit. Apps are still a bit slow to load,
> (watching the bouncing small launch icon lazily bouncing like it was on
> the moon).

try:

cat /proc/cmdline

Also, make sure all your cores are running.

Check the /var/log/boot.msg files for warnings and weird stuff.

> 2. Video - sysinfo from konqueror reports
>
> Vendor: nVidia Corporation
> Model: Vanta/Vanta LT
> 2D driver: nouveau
> 3D driver: swrast (No 3D Acceleration) (7.8.2)
>
> I think according to the docs this needs attention. However going to
> the ftp site for nvidia shows the G01 and G02 files for the upscale
> cards but the legacy files don’t seem to be there in the same place
> (i586). Anybody know if these are still available?

I believe they have already prepared the rpm for easy installation. Try… Dunno about the legacy
drivers.

Anyway, the video driver would not make that difference except on videdo intensive tasks. A window
redraw can be much faster, yes, but not a daemon or opening a file.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

gogalthorp · July 30, 2010, 2:58am

Legacy will probably use the 178 driver download and install the hard way (not really hard) from NVIDIA site. You will need to install the kernel-source the gcc compiler.

user · July 30, 2010, 2:56am

On 2010-07-30 01:36, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2010-07-29 23:36, colbec wrote:

…

> Anyway, the video driver would not make that difference except on videdo intensive tasks. A window
> redraw can be much faster, yes, but not a daemon or opening a file.

I thought of something, prompted by something I read in the oS mail list.

If your system has to draw “effects”, and you have the opensource driver, I think it uses the CPU
for this, instead of using the GPU in the graphics card as much as really possible. If the cpu is
busy with graphics, the rest of the tasks will run slower.

But this would show in “top” somewhere, perhaps in the X process. Ie, busy system.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

colbec22 · July 30, 2010, 12:54pm

OK one thing to watch for is the existence of the kdeupdateapplet from a previous install. I had set the applet to run auto in 11.2 and this carried over to 11.3. Now this is fine and good except it runs pretty much silently which might not be what you want. I managed to turn it off and reduced my load from 3.0+ to about 2.0. One of the issues was that I don’t think the update was proceeding properly. Needed to run it manually to get some feedback.

Went through the update process to ensure I have all the best versions. Load started coming down into the 0.5 area, good. Installed the desktop kernel version, not much change.

Desktop effects are off.

With only firefox and top running to add this note, load is 0.2. Starting thunderbird immediately maxes out the single processor and top shows a constant 1.6 load. TBird takes over 100 sec to load.

I’ll try to get some comparative numbers from 11.2.

colbec22 · July 30, 2010, 1:52pm

11.2 is back up. Loads are still high, ~1.6 with TBird/FF/top running, but in 11.2 TBird only takes 25 sec to be up and fully running on top of FF/top. Significant difference here from 100 sec on 11.3. But evidently it is not the processor which runs at about the same load. Overall system response is significantly better in 11.2.

Anything else to check?

user · July 30, 2010, 2:10pm

On 2010-07-30 13:06, colbec wrote:

> With only firefox and top running to add this note, load is 0.2.
> Starting thunderbird immediately maxes out the single processor and top
> shows a constant 1.6 load. TBird takes over 100 sec to load.

You might have to purge TB caches. I think you may need to run “compact” on some folders, TB is very
inefficient at reclaiming mbox deleted messages.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

colbec22 · July 30, 2010, 3:05pm

On my system TBird binary is located on the /home partition so remains the same whether 11.2 or 11.3 is the OS.

So in theory the cache state of TBird should be independent of the issue.

druj_nas · July 30, 2010, 4:30pm

Hello.

I was just going to login and start topic like this, but here it is.

First, I tried Fedora 13 with KDE and it was painfully slow. With Suse 11.3 I did not get much better results but it is notably faster. Anyway its not comfortable. Considering that 11.2 with KDE 4.3 worked in excellent speed, I am not satisfied with this.

I know that my configuration is far from required nowdays but I shared a lot of optimism with 11.2. Now freshly installed xp (dual boot) works faster than my Suse 11.3. I don’t like this.

Quick information copy/paste:

Processor (CPU): AMD Athlon™
Speed: 1,152.42 MHz (Funny but last time I checked on 11.2 it was 1.99 GHz )
Temperature: 39 °C
Memory Information
Total memory (RAM): 753.1 MiB (Not much, I know)
Free memory: 120.6 MiB (+ 303.9 MiB Caches)
Free swap: 4.0 GiB

Graphics: ATI Radeon 9200.

It just took me cca 6 seconds to open My Computer (sysinfo:/). The problem is also when more than one application is loaded. Desktop effects work fine, even Cube and so… But with disabled effects its still slow.

Trying to install ati proprietary drivers, and

“Detected configuration:
Architecture: i686 (32-bit)
which: no XFree86 in (/home/“username”/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/games:/usr/lib/jvm/jre/bin)
X Server: unable to detect
Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install”

What are your suggestions? Will Gnome work faster? Going back to 11.2 which will become unsupported in time anyway?

Or simply to install **** Small Linux for such desktop configurations as mine Except if someone thinks how to speed the thing up.