Hello, i was wondering if its a normal behaviour that when using transmission p2p application, my opensuse desktop feels alot slower than if not.
I mean, my applications take alot longer to actually launch and everythings feels a bit slower.
I checked htop on my console and nothing is eating at least CPU resources.
Thanks
resources are finite, once used in one area (torrent) they are not
available in another (desktop rendering/actions)…
if your machine is doing the best it can and is too slow then the
alternatives are:
if your machine is not doing its best (perhaps due to setup problems)
that is a different matter…
if you wish desktop actions to not be impacted by a background
torrent, then either pick a torrent programmed to be nice, or use nice
to start it…
see man nice
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
Tried LibreOffice? Do that and help at http://is.gd/dZ9j2W
[NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 + Thunderbird3.1.8]
I think a simple torrent program should be a problem.
Athlon II X4 3.0Ghz
2 GB DDR2
Its weird because, when i leave the pc unatended for a while and then for example launch konqueror it takes maybe 5-10 seconds for it to open.
But later on, after using the pc for a while, it gets almost as reponsive as it should be.
What does ‘top’ tell you
Do you have spindown enabled maybe?
On 04/04/2011 03:36 PM, assas1n wrote:
>
> Its weird because, when i leave the pc unatended for a while and then
> for example launch konqueror it takes maybe 5-10 seconds for it to
> open.
i think that is caused by various power savings functions…either in
the machines BIOS, or in Linux, or both…
many machines will let the hard drive spin down after some minutes of
inactivity…of course if you have a torrent running i’d guess the
drive is active…but, none of the desktop things would be going…
and, if you have a torrent going full blast, then because nothing else
is happening the torrent will have taken over almost all of the
memory, clock cycles and ins-and-outs…to move max data…which is
what you want, right?
and, then when you come back and start move the mouse, hit the key,
and etc the system has shut down the screen saver, crank up the
graphics chip, move the mouse cursor as you commanded, maybe bring
FireFox to live again and while it throttles back the torrent, network
and hard drive demands, rearrange the memory, etc etc etc so as to
release resources you are demanding be put to use in other places…
it doesn’t take long, but it is not instantaneous…
do you dual/multi-boot? how do your other systems compare…i mean,
maybe you do have a problem which can be solved…10 seconds sounds
high to me…have you actually put a stop watch on it?
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life
just 2 days later. Talk about LUCK!
I must go to classes at the moment. But will do a further research on power savings features and such.
Will post back ASAP.
Thanks !
Well, checked the powersavings, and there is no disk spindown. Only CPU throttling (Cool’n’Quiet).
top just getting to my computer from inactivity. I left Opera running since the last time i used the computer, lots of flash and stuff, hence the CPU usage, but with or without Opera its the same behaviour.
It took 4-5 seconds to Konsole to open.
top - 19:33:24 up 1 day, 2:46, 3 users, load average: 0.11, 0.18, 0.24
Tasks: 180 total, 1 running, 179 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.7%us, 6.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 80.2%id, 0.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2054812k total, 1984876k used, 69936k free, 21216k buffers
Swap: 2104476k total, 185940k used, 1918536k free, 402540k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
21665 gabriel 20 0 1255m 860m 17m S 52 42.9 101:47.54 opera
21883 gabriel 20 0 986m 354m 11m S 15 17.6 44:10.61 operapluginwrap
1316 root 20 0 155m 32m 5072 S 2 1.6 22:03.69 Xorg
25765 gabriel 20 0 435m 22m 16m S 2 1.1 0:02.83 konsole
9687 gabriel 20 0 408m 43m 4876 S 1 2.2 27:55.96 transmission-gt
23344 gabriel 20 0 329m 16m 9228 S 1 0.8 1:44.38 smplayer
3267 gabriel 20 0 531m 6112 4332 S 0 0.3 0:13.00 kded4
3656 gabriel 20 0 285m 21m 1324 S 0 1.1 0:51.74 mysqld
25726 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.18 kworker/3:1
25736 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.12 kworker/1:2
25781 gabriel 20 0 8672 1160 788 R 0 0.1 0:00.16 top
1 root 20 0 12408 492 468 S 0 0.0 0:01.84 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.08 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.67 ksoftirqd/0
6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
7 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.18 watchdog/0
8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.39 ksoftirqd/1
12 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.17 watchdog/1
13 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/2
15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.27 ksoftirqd/2
16 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.19 watchdog/2
17 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/3
19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.21 ksoftirqd/3
20 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.15 watchdog/3
21 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
22 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
23 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
24 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.32 sync_supers
25 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 bdi-default
26 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd
27 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd
28 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
29 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify
30 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_hotplug
31 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_sff
32 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.08 khubd
33 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 md
34 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kondemand
59 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khungtaskd
I know this won’t be much helpful but ‘desktop feels a lot slower’ can be many things. For example (and not approaching system load areas), if your transmission is pumping at full speed and consuming all your bandwidth, any applications that might do network activity on start can eventually suffer from it.
Image application ‘foobar’ which does several network operations before it loads the UI (ex: DNS lookups, remote API checks, etc), if your bandwidth is being consumed by torrent activity, it can eventually take much longer to startup because it’s doing network operations in the background and the network is bottleneck’ed at some point (maybe the cause is transmission, or something else).
This is just one example of what could induce users to have a ‘slower desktop’. Of course further diagnosis is required to figure out what is happening 
Indeed, im mostly uploading at 2 MiB/s. Most of the torrents being Linux Distributions, helping where i can 
On 04/05/2011 01:06 AM, assas1n wrote:
>
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 21665 gabriel 20 0 1255m 860m 17m S 52 42.9 101:47.54 opera
> 21883 gabriel 20 0 986m 354m 11m S 15 17.6 44:10.61 operapluginwrap
> --------------------
67 percent of the CPU clock cycles and over 60 percent of the memory is
tied up with Opera and what it is doing…
shut down Opera and put a stop watch on Konsole opening (mine opens in
about 1 second (maybe less–i don’t have a stop watch handy), with
Firefox and Opera together open but taking less than 5% CPU and 10% memory…
maybe your Opera has a problem–i do not know?
do you have lots of tabs open doing lots of stuff? like maybe streaming
video and/or music…and also downloading files, and and and…
if so, remember you are using up the resources needed to make Konsole
spring to life in an eye blink…
i repeat: resources are finite, once used in one area
(Opera/torrent/streaming/etc) they are not available in another (desktop
rendering/actions/opening Konsole, etc)…
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!
I found a “solution”.
Switched to Ktorrent but still had high CPU usage (25% of a 4-core CPU).
Looked around in google and found out that uTP was a major cause of cpu hogging!
Went down from around 30% to 15% !
On 04/08/2011 12:06 AM, assas1n wrote:
>
> I found a “solution”.
> Went down from around 30% to 15% !
good for you!!
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!
After all, i discovered what the issue was.
I checked cat /proc/cpuinfo and saw that i only had 1 core being recognized, of four the cpu has.
So i went in the BIOS and disabled ACPI, started back up and magic, 4 cores, and no more slowing down to crawl speed!
Only issue now, is that cpuinfo shows 0 Mhz on core clock
IMO that’s kind of weird,
when you run top (see as an option) or htop (displays by default), you should be able to see which processor each process is assigned.
So, wondering if you’re <really> “seeing only one core.”
From what I’ve seen, you may not have really pinpointed the problem because it doesn’t take much (a reboot, maybe simply stopping an app) to change the dynamics enough that you’re no longer observing the same situation.
I haven’t analyzed Transmission so I’m not that familiar with how it works. From what I’ve seen in Ktorrent, compared to other torrent apps, IMO it’s very agressive maintaing half-open (waiting) connections which might be important for your types of downloads.
I recommend you might take a look at what I’ve posted which may be relevant to what you’re doing… The idea is that a default distro install (not just openSUSE) assumes and therefor is tuned for “typical” file transfers on limited hardware (lowest common denominator which will run on all likely hardware)… ie. tiny files only a few kilobytes, not more than a few bytes in size, using wired (relatively reliable) connections, either in a 10/100 LAN or connected to the Internet using a connection measured in hundreds of kilobits at most, and only one file downloaded from one server at a time.
If your file transfer is a combination of parameters not described above, then you’ll likely want to tune your machine, I posted instructions on how to enlarge your TCP buffers, enable some advanced TCP options, and if necessary modify your Congestion Control algorithm
Tony
On 2011-04-05 03:06, assas1n wrote:
>
> Indeed, im mostly uploading at 2 MiB/s. Most of the torrents being Linux
> Distributions, helping where i can
Which possibly means lots of disk reads at random places to upload chunks
of those files. Your computer would be slow not because the cpu is busy,
but because the disk is busy.
You also said:
> Its weird because, when i leave the pc unatended for a while and then
> for example launch konqueror it takes maybe 5-10 seconds for it to
> open.
> But later on, after using the pc for a while, it gets almost as
> reponsive as it should be.
The second time it the app is cached in memory, does not has to be read
from disk.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
On 2011-05-05 00:36, assas1n wrote:
>
> After all, i discovered what the issue was.
>
> I checked cat /proc/cpuinfo and saw that i only had 1 core being
> recognized, of four the cpu has.
When running “top”, type “1”.
> So i went in the BIOS and disabled ACPI, started back up and magic, 4
> cores, and no more slowing down to crawl speed!
Disable ACPI? That is bad.
> Only issue now, is that cpuinfo shows 0 Mhz on core clock
Matches.
Mmm… what distro and kernel are you using? “cat /proc/version”.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
On 05/05/2011 04:20 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
>> So i went in the BIOS and disabled ACPI, started back up and magic, 4
>> cores, and no more slowing down to crawl speed!
>
> Disable ACPI? That is bad.
yep…if you (@assas1n) have installed the kernel-docs (or something
like that, maybe it is the kernel dev package, or other) package you
should find on your hard drive at
file:///usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
a long list of acpi switches that any one of which might do what you
want, and let the other parts continue to function…
no, i wouldn’t know which you might need but instead of just trying each
i’d suggest if you spent some time with google you might hone in on the
best mix that will give you what you want in speed and power control…
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[openSUSE11.3 + KDE4.5.5 + Firefox3.6.17 + Thunderbird3.1.10 via NNTP]
HACK Everything → http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5b4CCe9pS8&NR=1
gabriel@linux-a7dy:~> cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.38.4-2-desktop (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 4.5.1 20101208 [gcc-4_5-branch revision 167585] (SUSE Linux) ) #1 SMP PREEMPT 2011-04-26 17:30:28 +0200
What i found in google is putting “acpi=off” on the boot loader parameters.
I will open a new topic regarding this issue.