12.1 (or kernel 3?) Performance issues

English Hardware
1

Hi, is it the kernel 3 or anything new that swallows my resources?

After about 5 different set ups on several machines and 3 on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1310, 1 Gb RAM), I couldn’t tell…

I felt tempted to try BTRFS on a fresh install of opensuse 12.1… leaving partition scheme identical, but formatting all and backing up my files to an external disk. I could have killed myself that afternoon… My laptop reminded me a windows swapping at full throttle and with nothing responding for ages.

Ok… I did face that my laptop is not new, and that I could live without snapper at all. And the next morning I drop the bomb and started over, with ext4 as when I was happy. Better results, but GNOME 3 was very hard to use, not even think of KDE.

No luck with the live cds… swapping as if it has 128 MB…

On 11.4 and the kernel 2.6.38.1 (think that was the last I upgraded to), I had many issues with some wireless network cards and access points, but even GNOME 3 ran fine so I used to work with it on my daily operation, and all applications worked very well.

Since I didn’t changed the packages that I have installed besides the appropriate upgrades, I’m stuck. Now I’m using XFCE and stopped browsing with Firefox starting from opensuse 12.1… as my laptop seems not to make it in survive that kind of challenge.

I’m thinking of downgrade the kernel, but realizing all kind of issues I may have, I wonder if is it worth to use 12.1 at all. On my mom’s Dell netbook (1Gb) with gnome 3 and just an IM and Chrome usage, and my sisters’ Dell notebook (4Gb) with full KDE 4.7 things go on rails.

Fortunately the disapointed user is me :slight_smile: so don’t have to hear complains and wishes to get back to windows (I’m happy that they are happy and comfortable with 12.1).

What do you think? Shall I downgrade just the kernel or the whole distribution?

Cheers

2

So I am not sure just what the issue is but GNOME 3.2 is much different than version 2 that came with openSUSE 11.4 and if KDE is not your cup of tea, why not drop back to openSUSE 11.4, still supported for now? I am still using 11.4 on my main system and I can install any kernel version I want though we do not recommend dropping the kernel version below what came with the release at first. You can find all of the ISO files here: Index of /pub/opensuse/distribution/11.4/iso

The normal ISO files names you are looking for there are as follows:

openSUSE-11.4-KDE-LiveCD-i686.iso
openSUSE-11.4-KDE-LiveCD-x86_64.iso
openSUSE-11.4-GNOME-LiveCD-i686.iso
openSUSE-11.4-GNOME-LiveCD-x86_64.iso
openSUSE-11.4-DVD-LiveCD-i686.iso
openSUSE-11.4-DVD-LiveCD-x86_64.iso

Thank You,

3

Thanks, I neither am so willing to downgrade the default kernel.

The main difference I noticed with the last 2.6 kernel I used is that before I could have firefox, calc, gimp all on gnome 3 running along with vmplayer (512 mb for it and 512 mb for me).

Now I barely can open just some tabs in chrome that consumes near a half memory than firefox (according to my measures).

As I use this laptop to program microcontrollers, having just the mplabx ide based on netbeans and chrome simultaneously, I want to jump from the ceiling.

Think that the upper limit of my laptop’s hardware is the previous version of all software.

4

On 02/01/2012 08:46 AM, mgnome wrote:
>
> Thanks, I neither am so willing to downgrade the default kernel.
>
> The main difference I noticed with the last 2.6 kernel I used is that
> before I could have firefox, calc, gimp all on gnome 3 running along
> with vmplayer (512 mb for it and 512 mb for me).
>
> Now I barely can open just some tabs in chrome that consumes near a
> half memory than firefox (according to my measures).
>
> As I use this laptop to program microcontrollers, having just the
> mplabx ide based on netbeans and chrome simultaneously, I want to jump
> from the ceiling.
>
> Think that the upper limit of my laptop’s hardware is the previous
> version of all software.

You make it sound as if the “kernel 3” was some kind of major change. It was
not! What happened is that Linus decided that calling a kernel 2.6.40 made that
last number too large, thus he called it 3.0 instead. The changes from 2.6.39 to
3.0 were the same kind of things that took place from 2.6.38 to 2.6.39.

Your system is a little underpowered for what you are trying to do. For
openSUSE, starting with 1 GB of RAM and putting 1/2 of it in a VM would be
expected to cause problems. If you could increase that to 2 or 3 GB, you would
see a lot of difference. Also, what is the CPU speed? A quick Google search
showed that the Vostro 1310 was available with CPUs that ranged from a 1.86 GHz
Celeron M to a T9500 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo. The low end would definitely be slugginsh.

My laptop has a 2.0 GHz dual core AMD with 3 GB of RAM, and it works fine with
openSUSE 12.1 even with 1 GB assigned to a VirtualBox VM. My main guest is
Windows XP, thus I don’t expect much performance there, but the host does just
fine even when the guest is busy. Linux guests have good performance. Note: I
use nouveau for my nVidia graphics adapter as I cannot taint my kernel with
proprietary drivers.

5

This laptop is under powered, I agree with that. Although it has a nice cpu, Intel(R) Core™2 Duo CPU T5670 @ 1.80GHz it has its remarkable limitations.

My expectations were as such, that there would be no dramatic changes from one version to another, and I’m sure they aren’t… based on your comments I can confirm that. That was one of my initial thoughts but I was wrong.

But in practice I tried several setups and tuning (i.e. repartitioning but trying to conserve the schema of /, 2gb swap and /home and achieved no good results. Tried from changing display manager, several crazy combinations of desktop and window managers, besides disable tracker, disabling the unnecessary daemons, have 20+ gb of free space, monitor cpu using top (nothing unusual though), etc.

My main concern is how could it be that similar software configuration works flawlessly on a 11.4 upgraded over an existing 11.3 and doesn’t work at all (even attempts to economize resources) on a fresh 12.1 installation… I would expect that there were no huge difference, but my level of expertise cannot afford that.

As I couldn’t make it perform like my previous 11.4, it seems that I’ll go back to that version and live happy.

Cheers and thanks,

6

On 02/01/2012 11:26 AM, mgnome wrote:
> My main concern is how could it be that similar software configuration
> works flawlessly on a 11.4 upgraded over an existing 11.3 and doesn’t
> work at all (even attempts to economize resources) on a fresh 12.1
> installation… I would expect that there were no huge difference, but
> my level of expertise cannot afford that.
>
> As I couldn’t make it perform like my previous 11.4, it seems that I’ll
> go back to that version and live happy.

That is, of course, up to you. My experience is that 12.1 is no worse than 11.4,
but my configuration and workload are different that yours.

7

On 2012-02-01 23:04, Larry Finger wrote:
> That is, of course, up to you. My experience is that 12.1 is no worse than
> 11.4, but my configuration and workload are different that yours.

Hum. Systemd is a difference, and gnome 3 needs hardware accel.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)

8

On 02/03/2012 03:28 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2012-02-01 23:04, Larry Finger wrote:
>> That is, of course, up to you. My experience is that 12.1 is no worse than
>> 11.4, but my configuration and workload are different that yours.
>
> Hum. Systemd is a difference, and gnome 3 needs hardware accel.

Yes, but if systemd is a problem, the workaround is published in many places. If
you don’t have hardware accelerati0on, Gnome 3 degrades gracefully and lets you
know what it is doing.

In either case, it is not a kernel issue, which has been my main point in the
thread.

9

Hi all,

I upgraded to OpenSuse 12.1 and I have similar hardware and similar experiences to mgnome. In my case I have HP Compaq 6715b with 1GB RAM. In OpenSuse 11.4 everything worked ok. Now there are moments when it starts to heavily swap to disk. It swaps so much that I cannot do anything - even switch to text console to see the source of the problem. It swaps for 2-3 minutes and returns to normal state.

None of my programs have rather increased memory usage. It looks like something changed in memory usage in Linux kernel virtual machine model. I feel like when I used old windows 95 and tried to access floppy disk. :wink:

I know I should buy some additional Gigabytes of RAM, but what worry me most is I’ve never seen Linux kernel behavior like that. Even in most heavy usage I was seeing Linux responding. Now it is not. Just using Firefox can make it swaps so much, that I want to do something quickly the best way is to switch off the computer and switch on again.

Between 11.4 and 12.1 kernels there was the transparent huge pages patch. I tried to switch it off (by echoing never to proper files in /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage) but I did not see any changes to my symptoms. Should I recompile the kernel with this patch excluded at all ?

I don’t want to just buy some RAM, but to find out why it is not responding in such trivial case. Please advice.

10

As far as I know, the huge pages patch is not required with kernel 3.1 however, if you felt there was some reason to switch to kernel 3.2, you can do so with my bash script here: S.A.K.C. - SUSE Automated Kernel Compiler - Version 2.62 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

Further, if you don’t like openSUSE 12.1, there no reason not to drop back to openSUSE 11.4 as its still fully supported and perhaps wait for openSUSE 12.2 to come out later this year. I still am using openSUSE 11.4 on my main PC and you can use SAKC to load any kernel version that you want to use.

Thank You,

11

Thanks for the tip Jdmcdaniel3 .

I try your solution to compile new kernel version. I check if newer kernel version is more responsive in a case of memory shortage problems and with a lot of swapping.

Many thanks

12

Dear folks
I suffered a lot as you might have read, including change of some normal and innocent habits in using my laptop, but I had not enough time and willingness to drop back to 11.4, but…

I’m here again without having reinstalled or changed any more settings besides theese two:

  • Removed icedtea and openjdk
  • Installed sun jre

I tested many times the things that normally produced my earlier outages and here I am, happy with 12.1 updated to apr 6, 2012 and GNOME 3.2 working great! I’m sorry that I post so late but wanted to be absolutely sure of this.

Apparently openjdk doesn’t like some software that I need to use for work.

Cheers!

13

I apologize, you better don’t remove openjdk as another piece of software could still need to make use of it.
Just remove icedtea-web. Here is the procedure:

su
zypper rm icedtea-web

Then get jre-6u31-linux-x64-rpm.bin from java.com: Java + You
(Note that if you download the non rpm version you’ll have to tune your paths in the following commands)

chmod +x jre-6u31-linux-x64-rpm.bin
./jre-6u31-linux-x64-rpm.bin

update-alternatives --install “/usr/bin/java” “java” “/usr/java/jre1.6.0_31/bin/java” 1 ;notice the “1” here
update-alternatives --set java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_31/bin/java

rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so ;(you may not have this, no problem)

mkdir .mozilla/plugins ;(you may already have this, no problem jamaican)

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_31/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

;If you need, you can open the java control panel:
/usr/java/jre1.6.0_31/bin/ControlPanel

;now test if everything is ok:
java -version

You should see something like:
java version “1.6.0_31”
Java™ SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_31-b04)
Java HotSpot™ 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.6-b01, mixed mode)

Cheers,