I have two OpenSuse installations, one desktop and one laptop.
Both are ‘up to date’ but only the** desktop** installation runs extremely slowly and jerkily, sometimes causing the ventilation fan to drive at max speed.
The Desktop configuration has OpenSuse 13.2 64-bit with Gnome 3.14.1
CPU is a dual Pentium / 1GB RAM. Swap space is 5GB.
Can anyone help me to put my finger on the source of this miserable performance? It’s driving me nuts!
Cheers
Harvey
Run “top” in a terminal. Check whether there is a looping process that is eating CPU time.
About 194 processes are loaded when no other applications are started
Xorg is always near the top of the list, especially when Firefox is running, and something called glib-pacrunner keeps appearing near the top.
I wonder if there was some indexing going on, that now seemed to have stopped after about 4 hours up-time?
Well 1GB RAM is a little light these days, especially if running memory intensive applications. Swap will almost certainly be being used, with the overheads that can result from paging in an out.
Fresh install?
If so, yes, there is heavy indexing on a fresh install of 13.2, unless you turn it off.
1 GiB of RAM and 5 GiB of Swap?
why use a 64bit version with so little Ram, at most swap should be 2xRam, and if you have more then 2 GiB of ram in my expirience it’s better not to use swap, my desktop has 4G of Ram no Swap a 32 bit OS it runs great, I use to run an older P4 with 2 Gigs of ram with no swap, a hdd can not replace Ram, Gnome is quite resource intensive what kind of graphic card/driver do you have, you need decent 3d acceleration for Gnome, you’re better off using Mate (if you can get it running) or LXDE for that system.
imo your problem is with Ram (or lack off) the incredably big swap that causes a lot of hard disk reads/writes and the 64bit OS that requires more RAM, I’d recommenced repartitioning and reinstalling, use 1-2 GiB for Swap and install a 32bit OS, even if you buy more RAM I’d still recommenced less swap and a 32bit OS, 64 is good only if you have 8 or more GiB of Ram.
No, a larger Swap does not cause any problems. Linux does not use the full amount of Swap just because you created a larger partition. Unlike Windows, Swap is a partition, not a file.
Any Swap space is only used if the System needs it for the task(s) it is performing. With only 1-Gig of RAM, a Swap of 4-Gigs minimum (so, 5-Gigs is fine) should be used.
The only reason for creating a smaller Swap partition is to free up more HD space for other partitions.
Well it is a fresh install, several days ago, and the system has been running in between (slowly, jerkily) since then. I guess the total run time must have been about 10 hours (at a very rough guess)
Something called ‘plugin-containe’ is right at the top of the list during this particularly jerky behaviour. Where does that come from?
That’s probably flash applets.
Try the “flashblock” firefox extension. That way, you only see the flash that you choose to see.
OK, not sure (yet) if it helps. As far as I know I only had one audio stream running anyway.
The above flashblock suggestion obviously has the advantage that opening new (flash-burdened) browser tabs no longer slows things down additionally. I might not have been too concious of this previously.
Just to add one more point: apparently polkitd starts up from time to time. When it does, it seems to take over the CPU for a few seconds, and ‘jerky’ behaviour is the result.
…and could it be that kswapd0 freezes activity (closing/minimising windows, opening/switching tabs…) for about 15 seconds?
I am beginning to get a picture at last. The laptop has 4 GB RAM and 2 GB Swap space. The slow and jerky desktop has 1 GB RAM and 5 GB Swap space.
The ‘top’ profiles are similar: Firefox, Gnome-shell, Xorg are all constantly at the top of the list in both configurations. On the Desktop configuration (but not on the laptop), the slow and jerky behaviour is at its worst when Firefox is running and also when kswapd0 cuts in.
Desktop is running at around 50% RAM (i.e ca. 450 MB) and 8% swap most of the time. On the Laptop, the RAM runs at around 40% (i.e. ca. 1.3 GB) and the swap space is seldom used.
Naively put, it seems if I extend the desktop RAM to 4 GB, the problem should go away…am I right or am I right?
On the other hand, it seems that the swap activity produces such unpleasant behaviour (and I mean that it really is not much fun using the desktop in this condition) and that doesn’t seem right either. So I wonder if there is some (development?) optimisation needed there as well. Any opinions?
Cheers
Harvey
I have an old work laptop that had 2GB RAM (with openSUSE 12.3 and KDE at the time). I started to find some graphical applications (eg Google-Earth) were running with lag and swap being used intensively. Upgrading to 4GB RAM eliminated the issue for me, with little sap now being used.
FWIW, I also owned an old laptop (ThinkPad Z60m) that I’ve now given away. It was a 32-bit machine and could only support up to 2GB RAM maximum, so check the specs before you buy more RAM (if 32-bit machine).
Most likely. FF wants tons of RAM If not there it goes to swap and swap is slow. 1gig is getting to be the bottom limit of the recommended range any more. More RAM is always good lol!
Thanks for this input (also to deano_ferrrari above).
One thing does puzzle me, though. I have 1GB RAM. In the ‘quiet’ condition (i.e. no applications running, except Gnome Terminal and Gnome System Monitor), around 300MB of RAM are being used and 400 MB are out on the swap disk. Why is the swap disk being used at all when there is enough RAM available?
Cheers
Harvey
If swap is touched it sill register.WSO if at some point some swap was used then it does not go away it may be reused but it is not erased since the system does not know wither it is need again or not. Think of the swap number as a high water mark
Thanks. That makes sense. I will probably add a Gig or two of RAM to improve the performance of my desktop configuration. 
Cheers
Harvey
I would certainly think that should solve most or even all of the problem.
Note, though, that not all machines with 1-Gig RAM have the same problem: It also has to do with motherboards, graphics cards, and more.
I have a few 1-Gig towers running 12.3 or 13.1, a couple are quite jerky (older ASUS motherboards, even though reasonably good cpus), and a couple seem to perform quite satisfactorily. All of them would perform better with more RAM, of course. I see similar performance differences with a few different laptops, as well.
Of course, my 2-to-4-Gig systems (towers and laptops) perform well.