Load times and sloppy system

borkdox · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Posts: 123

For example, in windows firefox takes about 5-6 seconds to start, in gentoo it takes about 10-11 seconds, the double... It is like that with many apps, loadtimes are long.

If I am doign an emerge sync, or emerging anything with is very high HD activity everything becomes sloppy, programs become unresponsive, etc...

Any one else expericing this? should I get 1gig of ram (I currently have 512)?

hvengel · Guru Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 515

On my 3500 Winchester machine Firefox opens in about 3 seconds in Windows and a slightly faster in Linux. I do not see any of the unresponsiveness that you are reporting. I do however have more memory than you do with 1G. I can emerge a package and then do other things on my desktop and everything is nearly as fast as when not emerging.

So perhaps you need more memory or perhaps there is a config problem with your machine. I do have my kernel configured with preemptable kernel turned on. This may help and is worth trying. You might also look into tuning your hdparms as it sounds like you diskdrives are causing some kind of bottle neck.

borkdox · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Posts: 123

I confirm something is wrong. I installed ubuntu and firefox starts in like 4 seconds, so now I know that there is something wrong what this gentoo install.

I was using LDFLAGS and more CFLAGS, but the other day I decided to ditch them and the system felt a little faster, so I think I am going to keep the simple CFLAGS and no LDFLAGS for now....

Is my HD-Parm result low? it looked fine to me, what do you think? what are some popular hdparm tweaking options?

What else can I do?

Clean my USE-flags?

Remove all the unused packages (is there any tool that can help me do this, I am using xfce4 now so I dont want any gnome desktop libs...)?

please give me some ideas... I really want to experience gentoo's performance...

nudd · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2005 Posts: 18

because amd64 has twice as many registers in 64 bit mode, it is said to be faster with register optimisation flags:

-fweb -frename-registers

but be warned that it may break things in your system and make it impossible to debug! (These two flags are included in -O3 so no point if you are already using -O3).

The hdparm -t seems alright (that's what I get from my Hard Drives and Firefox loads in around 4 seconds the first time for me too).

borkdox · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Posts: 123

whig · l33t Joined: 27 Nov 2004 Posts: 973 Location: New Zealand

This file in the kernel source tree would be of use: Documentation/ide.txt

hvengel · Guru Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 515

Here is what I am using for hdparms

hda_args=" -d1 -u1 -m16 -c1"

But be warned that the best parms may be different on your system and these may also make you system unstable. So be very careful when you start making changes to your hdparms. If you google on hdparm you will find lots of info on this and also some howto's on how to test this. Depending on your hardware and what the default values are this can make a big difference. I found that my disk drive performance increased about 25% after changing this from the default values. I just looked at you original post and your disk drive numbers were not too bad. I am seeing about 80% higher for the Timing cached reads (1909 to 2087 MB/sec depending on the disk drive) and slightly slower Timing buffered disk reads at around 40 MB/sec.

As to the make.conf settings I am using CFLAGS="-march=k8 -O2 -pipe". So these are basicly the default settings. I am not sure if -march=athlon64 is the same as -march=k8. Might be worth checking.

You might also consider using prelink. This will help program load times. But I would do this until the underlaying problems have been resolved.

Also I notice that you are using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64 ~amd64" as global defaults. This means that you will be running lots of masked software. While much of the masked software may not be a problem some of it may not be very stable and this may be the source of your problem. Since your system is having problems perhaps you should change this to just include stable software (amd64 only) and remerge with the new values. This will likely downgrade some files. But it may also fix your performance problems. I am more selective in my use of ~amd64 and only use it for specific packages rather than globaly. I think this should be the first thing you try.

borkdox · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Posts: 123

I just reinstalled the whole system, and firefox starts clean in less than 4 seconds. Everything is smooth and tighty. My CFLAGS are very conservative (-march=k8 -O2 -pipe), but everything is good so far, I hope it stays that way....