Is there a paging monitor for openSUSE?

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1

My system periodically hangs with a massive amount of disk activity. One possible cause is thrashing. Is there an application that will display a graph of the paging rate over time?

Also, is this the right forum for such questions? A monitor for low-level system activity is not your usual question, but it doesn’t really fit in hardware.

2

Hi
Lots, sysstat tools (iostat), nmon, vmstat. What desktop environment, could be an indexing program…?

3

I use KDE.

I wanted to upgrade from 2 GiB to 8 GiB, but they’re not making DDR2 any more, so if it’s paging I’m sunk until I get a new machine.

4

Hi
Desktop or Laptop?

5

Tower. What with the pace of miniaturization, I expect that my next machine will be a desktop.

I do have LEAP 15.1 on an old laptop, but it isn’t having the high disk activity and the hangs.

6

Hi
Ahh ok, I have some 2GB PC2 modules for laptops lying around, no motherboard ones…

Thought of trying a lighter desktop on the system eg XFCE? But sounds like maybe the Plasma search tool indexing could be the culprit (I run GNOME here)?

7

Maybe it’s not being made, but it’s still available, e.g.:

8

Don’t know about the rest of this Planet but, here in Germany there’re at least 2 shops who are offering DDR2 modules:

  • I’m making absolutely no apologies for the German language web sites …

<%category-title% günstig online kaufen;
<Arbeitsspeicher | PC Hardware | K&M Computer;

9

Related to what you’re asking about (How memory is managed, reading stats, resolving an the issue if you suddenly want to clear all buffers and cache)
I wrote a wiki article on how to use the Free tool because it’s easy to assume incorrectly what different values are

https://en.opensuse.org/User:Tsu2/free_tool

Free doesn’t update continuously, but you can cause it to execute repeatedly with a specified interval which would be close to “monitoring” as you probably want…
And,
Of course as promised at the end of the article I provide the command that resets your buffers and cache which would be useful if you’ve ending up working on a major workload, and now intend to do something completely different (Since you’re doing something completely different, it’s unlikely anything stored in buffers and cache would be relevant to your new work, so it may be more efficient to manually clear rather than allow the system to automatically clear using its own algorithm)

BTW - And FYI “paging” in Linux usually has a different meaning, it has to do with sending output to the console. And probably less often but still commonly used, “paging” is used to describe simply writing data to memory addresses which in a more narrow sense is related to your question. For what you’re asking about, you’re asking about the swap file or partition.

TSU

10

If you’re currently using KDE, then although it’ll install on a 2GB RAM machine, IMO it won’t run well (IMO KDE requires 4GB minimum, the more the better).
If you multiboot XFCE and try to run your KDE apps, you’ll end up installing the Qt framework when most XFCE apps use the Gtk framework (last I checked).

The natural lightweight substitute for KDE is LXQt which uses the exact same Qt Framework.
Although LXQt comes with its own recommended apps, it probably would have the least trouble running KDE apps.

Or,
If you really, really want to go lightweight, just run a Window Manager instead of a full Desktop.
Even on just 2GB RAM, you should be able to run at least a couple decently heavy apps simultaneously with little trouble.
All openSUSE installs with some Desktop would have also installed IceWM, to access you logout, select IceWM from a menu and log back in.
IceWM gives you many visual objects people find in a normal Desktop… an application button, taskbar, support for stacking windows (windows that can overlap and move around).
There are also a fairly large number of other Window Managers available in the default openSUSE repository.

TSU

11

Look on ebay, you can still get them on ebay, the downside is that ddr2 sometimes can get are a little more expensive than ddr3 or ddr4.

12

I’ve grown fond of iotop recently. I usually let it run thusly…

▶ sudo **iotop** -aokd 10

… while browsing, playing Steam games, compiling stuff, and so on. It’s quite interesting to observe how much data some programs write to disk.

The options I’m using are:

  • -a, --accumulated — show accumulated I/O instead of bandwidth
  • -o, --only — only show processes or threads actually doing I/O
  • -k, --kilobytes — use kilobytes instead of a human friendly unit
  • -d SEC, --delay=SEC — delay between iterations (I chose 10 seconds)

Cheers!

13

I’ve only found that iotop reports disk activity which can be attributed to anything so may or may not be reporting activity related specifically to swapping.

TSU

14

I’m a bit leery of buying used DIMMs on e-bay. Maybe I’d b better of locating an ECC MB that’s compatible with OS/2 and Linux and is still under warranty. Right now, while price is certainly a concern, I’m more worried about reliability.

15

I’m not at all. Probably half the sticks I have in my 20+ working PCs came from eBay. I even bought brand new DDR4 from it once. Twice when a bad stick arrived, I told seller, and seller promptly sent replacement without wanting old one back (same as has happened with non-RAM purchases from it more than once). Ebay has been a great RAM source for me. It doesn’t let sellers get away with anything bad.

16

You’re correct, Tony. The manpage for iotop merely states that…

It also displays the percentage of time the thread/process spent while swapping in and while waiting on I/O.

It seems that actual number of bytes written to (or read from) swap isn’t recorded by iotop, only »percentage of time«. I wouldn’t notice because I personally haven’t used any swap for ages.

So measuring swap activity requires swapon or one of the tools Malcolm Lewis was referring to. Worth considering.