Do I need a memory upgrade?

English Hardware
1

PC is a CybertronPC Assault A46
http://www.amazon.com/CybertronPC-GMTRPA434BK-Assault-A46-Desktop/dp/B00NC07BTI

I have changed the PSU and CPU cooler so far. Wasn’t happy with Win 8.1 so switched to openSUSE 13.2 KDE just recently (I’ve used openSUSE before). Been noticing lately that there’s lots of times where the whole system seems to freeze up for a few minutes and the HDD activity LED is steadily lit. System Monitor shows 1.7 GiB of 3.0 GiB in use as well as 0.17 GiB of 2.0 GiB Swap in use. Not sure why it shows 3.0 GiB for the total physical RAM, there is 4 GB stick installed and only 768MB at most should be set aside for graphics (that is physical limit of the APU if I understand correctly). So shouldn’t it show 3.328 GiB of physical memory for the total?

I have run memtest86+ and a HDD utility to check for bad RAM or failing hard drive (the utilities are from Ultimate Boot CD on a CD-R disc) and there were no reported problems.
I can see in KInfoCenter that the HDD is showing as IDE for the Bus. I do know the HDD is SATA III (6.0G interface) and the motherboard has only SATA II (3.0G interface) ports, so the HDD will take a performance hit (no idea why the system builder [CybertronPC] would do such a thing).

I’m looking into upgrading the RAM to 16GB (2x 8GB DDR3-1866) and the APU to A8-7670k with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo.
Would those upgrades solve issue I’m having with everything freezing up?

Also, out of curiosity, anyone happen to know if openSUSE supports the turbo speed of these AMD APUs? As example, with the current A4-6300 I have installed now, it is 3.7GHz and turbo to 3.9GHz. When I first got the machine it was running Windows 8.1 and the Windows Task Manager performance meter thing would show CPU speed occasionally increase to 3.9 when it would turbo. I have not yet seen anything in openSUSE show it at a speed of 3.9GHz, only in KInfoCenter it shows a 3.7GHz dual core CPU installed.

Thanks very much!

2

The issue you are seeing (system becoming unresponsive with high drive IO) is likely unrelated to having 4GB of memory.
Upgrading to 16GB will certainly help improve general performance and user experience, but I’m willing to bet the issue you are seeing has other causes.

Only using 0.17 GiB of 2.0 swap is good. If swap usage stays low, it further indicates you are not running into a general memory limitation issue.

To see your system memory information in more detail try these commands:

$free -m
and
$cat /proc/meminfo

To answer the question of why your system is going into a drive thrashing state, some other tools will help.

Try installing the iotop program (using ‘zypper install iotop’ in command line of via software install in Yast).
You must run the program as root. It will show processes with highest drive IO which will help you zero in on the problem.

As for use of CPU frequency scaling in your AMD A4-6300, this happens for you automatically. The Linux Kernel take care of this, and if you are running a standard Suse provided Kernel for 13.2, you should not have to do anything special. You can read more about how freq scaling works in Linux at https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/governors.txt

There are various tools for seeing and setting what frequencies are used, though the use of them depends on what kernel version you are on, and and what cpu.

Cheers,

3

This may indicate bad sectors on the drive. Run smartctl to check

4

Do I need a memory upgrade?

To answer that question fairly directly, no, or at least, you’ve not said anything to lead one to think that you do. But then, given how little you’ve said about what you want to do with the box, the more correct answer might just be ‘yes, but we don’t know what for’.

I’m looking into upgrading the RAM to 16GB (2x 8GB DDR3-1866) and the APU to A8-7670k with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo.
Would those upgrades solve issue I’m having with everything freezing up?

No.

I have changed the PSU and CPU cooler so far.

Presumably, that’s just an irrelevant detail that you decided to throw in, rather than something you thought was relevant to this issue.

openSUSE 13.2 KDE

Which version? 32 or 64 bit?

(no idea why the system builder [CybertronPC] would do such a thing).

To save money.

What you probably have is some sort of disk indexing going on. It could be updatedb, but it is more likely to be whatever KDE call their ‘symantic desktop’ stuff now (it seems to change name with every major release, but, whatever they call it, the thing that doesn’t change is that it doesn’t do anything you want and screws up your computer at times - turn it off; one day, in the future, it may do something that you actually want, and then, just maybe, there will be a case for using it, particularly if you are using an ssd, as by then you may be).

5

I had run a couple of different utilities for hard disks from Ultimate Boot CD. One utility (Seatools, is that what it’s called?) reports no problems with the drive, the other utility (Vivard 0.4) reported 8 bad sectors. Only had the machine for about 1 year now, pretty sad if components are failing already. The drive is a Toshiba 500GB, pretty sure it’s this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149380

I do also have an SSD drive that I could use, it will also take a performance hit due to the SATA II ports on motherboard.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791

I could still use it anyways, but I’m guessing that will require another fresh install of openSUSE. I’ll also have to learn how to set up with SSD as a boot drive then use the HDD for storage.

My current install is openSUSE 13.2 KDE 64 bit
Linux 3.16.7-29-desktop, at boot up I can see 4 different kernels to choose from, there is 3.16.7-32-desktop for newest. I rolled back one due to the newest one won’t let Chromium load up normally and then it crashes after a few minutes of use. Have yet to see a fix for it either. Can use a work around that I found here to load it up via cli and the command chromium --disable-namespace-sandbox
Think the crashing is due to using the open source graphics driver, NOT the AMD proprietary one. Again, I’d have to learn how to install that. Heard too many people say that installing it causes these APUs to not boot into gui desktop and no choice but to roll back to the open source driver.

The mention of switching PSU and CPU cooler is due to most system builders use cheap, low quality power supplies to save money. That was the case with this one too, they had a generic 350 watt one in there. I switched it to a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 860. No way I need 860 watts, but at least it’s got active PFC and over voltage protection and is 80 certified. Should leave some wiggle room for upgrades and add ons.
The CPU cooler was changed because I have no idea what the real temperature is that this thing is operating at. In BIOS is shows CPU at 34C. When it had Windows 8.1 (64 bit) I tried using Speedfan and a couple others to monitor temperatures, all of which gave different readouts (some showing the CPU temp at -150C!). Now in openSUSE I run the sensors command and see:

justin@linux:~> sensors
radeon-pci-0008
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:        -12.0°C  (crit = +120.0°C, hyst = +90.0°C)


k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:         +0.0°C  (high = +70.0°C)
                       (crit = +70.0°C, hyst = +69.0°C)

Don’t know how it’s at -12C with OS loaded, but in BIOS its at +34C
I used to run folding@home so that is the reason for monitoring temperatures. Had to stop folding when I started seeing the CPU temp reaching +80C and up (most of the A series APUs are shown to have a 70C max temperature, this A4-6300 does not give a figure and I don’t know what the max is that it can handle)

6

OK

i) Expanding the amount of RAM would only help if you are running out of RAM. The evidence is that you weren’t when you recorded “0.17 GiB of 2.0 GiB Swap in use”, but it could be different at different times.

ii) the situation with ‘sensors’ can be a bit random; different motherboards do things in different ways, and what works with the majority of mobos may well not work with yours. I’m guessing that AMD mobos are more susceptible to this than Intel ones, but in essence that is irrelevant; you can’t really trust the readings, because what you think might be a cpu temperature could easily be something else entirely.

iii) It might be worth trying the KDE System monitor. You may - just may - be able to get a good guess at what is going on with the various sensor signals by watching what they do over time.

iv) You may be running BTRFS. There must be times at which the activity with snapshots slows things down, particularly if configured for far too frequent snapshots. Otherwise, my previous suggestion of the disk indexing seems likely. Again the KDE Sys monitor can help, or you can use the command line. (I know on the tin it says ‘zero cost snapshots’ but that should really be ‘zero cost at the time of commitment snapshots’ and some real cost both in terms of disk space and execution at random other times.)

v) If you are going to use KDE sys monitor, you’ll need to configure it, because the default is ‘don’t display any info that might frighten the horses’ mode.

if you see any sign of ‘akonadi’, that’ll be your problem. It should not be turned on.

7

All I do know is the mobo is MSI A58M-E33 and has a Fintek super I/O chip.
Got this system as an upgrade to my old socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 custom build which finally died.
So far, such a huge upgrade and I don’t see any performance increase from the old machine.
Going from a 250GB IDE HDD to a 500GB SATA HDD and it seems to be slower instead of faster.
From a single core CPU (SL7E6 @3.4GHz/1M/800MHz with Hyper Threading) to a dual core with Radeon HD graphics (@3.7GHZ [3.9GHz turbo]/1M/no clue on bus speed) and it doesn’t seem like any difference at all.
DDR400 to DDR3-1600… that should be 4 times faster… sure doesn’t seem to be moving much faster to me.

No idea what KDE sys monitor is, where to find or how to get. I click the little green lizard icon at bottom left (similar to windows start button I assume). Go to Applications - System and choose the last one listed, which is System Monitor KSysGuard.

Went to Yast and Services Manager and see nothing about anything called ‘akonadi’

Anything about file system, I couldn’t even guess. I can’t even remember what options or settings were chosen during the openSUSE install. I just remember installing it from a USB flash drive since it wouldn’t install from DVD. Took me 3 or 4 weeks of searching through forums and all to figure out how to even do that because of this **** UEFI **** they use for BIOS.
At one point I had even tried to re-install Windows 8.1 just to have a computer that would boot to a working OS, but that won’t even install either.

8

That’s the correct name, and I have to apologise for not getting it right the first time (but I was ‘multitasking’ when I wrote that, so was a bit distracted). Note that, out of the box, it doesn’t monitor much, but you can drag and drop additional monitors and get it to display more info.

In particular, it will show up which tasks are responsible for what I/O, and that might be interesting. You can also see what swap activity is going on, and how much swap is used, and that would be interesting as a check on whether you are running out of ram (which, as I say, the evidence is that you are not, but maybe there are times when it is worse than others, and you measured at the wrong time).

You wouldn’t. It is a part of kde, and you would need to go in to KDE > System settings. If you type ‘akonadi’ in to the search box, it will show you how to get there (I’m using a different version of kde, and from here it is in ‘personal information’ but it might be different for your version). At one point, there was also something called nepomuk, and I can’t remember whether this was before/after/at the same time as akonadi… Or, even, baloo…(which, I think, is more recent, but my memory is probably failing me for the exact details, with all of this stuff).

If you get the general impression that it has taken the kde devs several bites at this particular cherry, you’d be right (and all to do a spiffy version of stuff most people can with relatively low impact from the command line with locate, if they are prepared to learn that…). Probably the more recent ones are significantly improved over the older ones, although it may just be a side-effect of faster hardware.

Going from a 250GB IDE HDD to a 500GB SATA HDD and it seems to be slower instead of faster.

The IDE interface is probably noticeably slower than the SATA one, but that wouldn’t really help if the disk was slower. Now that would probably be an unusual, but not impossible case, particularly if the system builder had gone for the cheapest price per Gig for their hard disk. Specifically, a low power/low rpm disk could easily be slower, even if the interface was faster. (Although that’s not the big thing here; you are getting lots of disk activity which is slowing stuff down, and that would be the case even on the faster disk, whichever of the two that is.)

DDR400 to DDR3-1600… that should be 4 times faster… sure doesn’t seem to be moving much faster to me.

No, it shouldn’t. The clock speed is fairly similar, so the data transfer rate is close, but the DDR3 does a longer data burst, and sometimes that’s an advantage and sometimes it is a disadvantage. And, anyway, this is the interface data rate of the memory, and that will likely have a lower impact on overall ‘speed’ than things like processor clock rate.

9

If you have bad or weak sectors the check sums will be wrong and the systems attempts to re-read the data until the sums match. During that time the system is frozen. This can lead to long pauses. You will normally hear a rapid tick tick caused by the head being tweaked to try and get a good read of the data. Using Seagate diagnostics on a Toshiba may or may not work correctly. smartctrl read the Smart diagnostic data direct fro the hard drive and can perform surface tests also see man smartctl for details

10

If the question is “why is my drive busy and my system hanging?” why not start with seeing what is causing IO on the drive?

iotop, or related IO utilities, will reveal what process(es) are performing IO to the drive.

Sure, there may be other layers below that, depending on what it shows, but why not just answer the question by answering the question?

Next time your drive is thrashing, just give it a go - watch the output for a few seconds, what’s the process at the top of the list?

We don’t have enough information to tell if it’s hanging on IO, if it’s one particular process eating IO, if the IO and IOWait don’t explain the system hanging, etc. Without that, everything is just a wild guess.

11

Check if ACPI is enabled in BIOS.

12

Also, any output in dmesg* during/after heavy I/O?

*open a terminal (konsole), type

dmesg -e

, check messages with timestamps matching your problem.

13

output from dmesg -e is so long that not all of it even shows in konsole… nearly all of it looks to be something to do with my wifi.
here is a small bit of it, looks like the same thing over and over again for the past 3 days or so.

  +0.000009] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2  +1.429252] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save..
  +0.000165] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
  +1.117880] Drop duplicate management frame with seq_num = 3205.
  +0.107482] Drop duplicate management frame with seq_num = 3209.
  +0.209251] survey done event(19) band:0 for enp0s19f2u3
  +1.139967] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...
  +0.000008] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2
  +2.002269] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save..
  +0.000350] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
  +2.001505] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...
  +0.000009] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2

This one slightly different.

  +1.930498] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...  +0.000008] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2
 +38.004507]  ~~~~set sta key:groupkey
  +0.000010] ==> rtw_set_key algorithm(2),keyid(2),key_mask(0)
  +0.002199] SetHwReg8192CU, 5126, RCR= 700760ce 
  +0.000008] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save..
  +0.000114] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
  +0.020043]  ~~~~set sta key:groupkey
  +0.000009] ==> rtw_set_key algorithm(2),keyid(2),key_mask(0)
  +0.002049] SetHwReg8192CU, 5126, RCR= 700060ce 
  +2.011495] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...
  +0.000008] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2
  +4.335070] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save..
  +0.000254] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
  +1.670678] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...
  +0.000008] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2
[Feb24 01:25] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save..
  +0.000210] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
  +0.900935] Drop duplicate management frame with seq_num = 201.
  +0.004349] Drop duplicate management frame with seq_num = 201.
  +0.517731] survey done event(24) band:0 for enp0s19f2u3
14

smartctl does nothing. I type the command, press enter the following shows and that’s all it does

linux:/home/justin # smartctl --test=long /dev/sdasmartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [x86_64-linux-3.16.7-29-desktop] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org


=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 60 minutes for test to complete.
Test will complete after Wed Feb 24 02:49:24 2016


Use smartctl -X to abort test.
linux:/home/justin #

there are no click sounds from the drive, ever

also, I can’t find any KDE settings to search for that ‘akonadi’

15

No, it shouldn’t. The clock speed is fairly similar, so the data transfer rate is close, but the DDR3 does a longer data burst, and sometimes that’s an advantage and sometimes it is a disadvantage. And, anyway, this is the interface data rate of the memory, and that will likely have a lower impact on overall ‘speed’ than things like processor clock rate.

Actually, yes it should. Key word being SHOULD.

DDR400 = 100MHz (at least with my Intel CPU, that is the standard clock rate) x2 (Double Data Rate makes it double right?) so it runs effectively at 200MHz. The 400 is how many MB/s on the rising and falling edges.
DDR3-1600 = 100MHz (this is the base clock rate, AMD uses Hyper Transport so it goes up to 2400MHz via Memory Controller). This RAM is 1600 MB/s on rising and falling edges.

1600 is 4 times as much as 400.
Speed (clock rate) in this case is an increase from 200MHz up to 2400MHz, which, is actually 12 times faster! This DDR3 actually runs 800MHz though, so that IS 4 times faster than the DDR400.

When I boot the machine and go into BIOS it shows on the screen RAM is 1600MHz. That is a outright lie that the manufacture uses as a marketing ploy. It is FALSE ADVERTISING!
This is all the devious work of those idiots at Intel (DDR and ATX are trademark of Intel after all).

Sure wish I had enough money to fund up a factory where I could manufacture my own type of hardware. It would be at least 10 times faster than what they already have available and I’d sell it for 1/10th the price just to drive these greedy corporate scum out of business!!

16

OK, after doing quite a bit of searching it turns out everyone tells me I should find this by clicking the Launcher (gecko button), Applications and then should see “System Settings”. There is no such thing showing for me. Turns out I press Alt + F2 and search for systemsettings and it comes up. Well it is NOT called System Settings, but IS called “Configure Desktop” with an icon of screwdriver and wrench.

Searched from there for akonadi and you’re right it is under ‘personal information’, it shows as disabled. Tried searching then for nepomuk and there were no search results. Then tried searching for baloo and it shows that as “Desktop Search” under Workspace Performance and Behavior. That one does have a check mark in the box for ‘Enable Desktop Search’. I’m guessing that is the Linux equivalent of “indexing” on Windows XP? (the mention of WinXP is due to that is the last Windows OS I have personally used since getting this machine which came with 8.1 preinstalled)

I will uncheck it and see what happens.

Next I’ll have to figure out how to get hardware monitoring to display accurate readouts. Maybe I’ll also try installing the AMD proprietary driver for the Radeon HD8730D graphics that is used on this APU. That will be after I have my laptop up and running though so that I have another machine to use in case things go wrong.