Choppy computer (mouse, 2D and 3D) in X

[Loke]

I'll just quote Beast-Master in one of his previous posts, as he seems to experience exactly the same problem Im having:

[dyoung]

I've had a very similar experience. I really notice the choppyness while compiling.

I tried for weeks to figure out the "problem". I thought it was my drive, motherboard, controller, video card, etc. Now I just think it's a weakness in Linux that I hadn't noticed until I starting using gentoo and compiling lots of stuff in the background.

If I emerge something (let's say tuxracer), then start dragging a window around the screen or scrolling up and down in a window eventually things will lock up, then unfreeze, then lock up again.. Try a similar test on Windows with the heaviest possible load on the system and you won't be able to cause the same problem.

People have suggested boosting the priority of X or lowering the priority of the compile but this really doesn't fix the problem. I have the low latency patch and preemptive patch as well.

For now I'm going to live with it and avoid dragging a lot while compiling. I figure eventually the linux scheduler will improve.

-- derek

[Loke]

OK. The choppyness doesnt seem to be related to disk access at all. I can compile alot of things and still play mp3 w/o any coppy sound. In fact, the X choppyness happens aprox every 8 sec or something regardless of system load.

Ive tried recompiling w/o low-latency patch - no go. Im now recompiling w/o preemptive mode, so I'll see if this affects it.

Im gonna try with a vanilla kernel, and see if its any different. If I cant fix this, I really cant continue using Gentoo because this behaviour is so f%¤"% annoying.

[Loke]

FYI:

None of this happened with Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1 or 8.2 or various testruns with RedHat.
And wether I use hdparm to tune my HDs doesnt seem to affect it at all.

[Malakin]

When you get laggy window rendering is your cpu near 0% utilization? If not try renicing X to something like -18 and see if it improves.

having mtrr not enabled in the kernel may greatly decrease window rendering performance.

[Loke]

Thanks for your reply, however:

The cpu utilization doesnt seem to impact this behaviour, as it occure wheter its idling or working with different tasks.

- How do I renicing X? I dont even know what that word means :-& (Im foreign)
- I'll look at MTRR in kernel, although I believe I did include MTRR support.

Disabling low-latency or preemptive didnt affect the problem at all btw. Im still having these annoying little hangs. Im gonna try another WM and see if the problem still exist.

Any more suggestions greatly appreciated!

[nizZy]

I got the sam problem too.. especially when im compiling.. Its very.. choppy.. The same when i copy big files. when I was transferring pk0.pk3 from the quake3 cd to the hd I hardly couldnt move the mouse in 5 seconds periods. Plz post the solution if some1 gets it.

[Manny Calavera]

As described above, set your nice values!
Different processes have different priorities. You can change the priority of the X server by setting it's nice value.
Just try playing with different values

@nizZy: have you already checked whether kjournald was running excessively during those freeze periods?

see you,
- Manny -
_________________
Viva la revolución!

[nizZy]

I just emerged GIMP. CC1 and CCP is in the top at around 2-25% load. Kjournal stays at 0.0 and CPU states are like: user 60-96% system 12-40% idle 0-5%

Ive got an amd t-bird 1.4ghz with 512mb RAM.. 512 mb SWAP.
Ive checked around the forums and almost everyone whos got performance problems ar running amd-based system. wtf could it be.. I reallt like gentoo but this is killing me..

Set my nice values? Should i run "nice emerge blablapacket" or what?

[tomte]

if you're using the gentoo-sources, compile the kernel without preempt and/or low latency, and see if the problem remains.

at least for me these problems occured not before I activated these options in my kernel

regards,
tom

[cmay4]

Same problem for me (Athlon XP 1600). I checked the kernel, and neither preemptible kernel or low latency options are being used. However, SMP support is checked...wierd. I'm going to try removing that.

Chuck

[Loke]

I dont know for the rest of you, but I seem to have solved my choppyness at least. I emerged fluxbox, and when using Fluxbox instead of KDE I dont experience this lag any more - even with preemptive and lowlatency patch applied.

So my guess is KDE somehow didnt like my compiler flags:

[nizZy]

from dmesg:

ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
CP_IDE: chipset revision 6
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO moes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE VIA vt82c686b (rev 40) IDE UDMA100 controller on pci00:07.1

I checked www.via.com.tw and my chip vt82c686b has performance problems with linux.
They only provide kernelpatchers for suse, mandrake and redhat... Cant unpack the redhat path.. tried with gunzip.. im such a lamer =) Should I use this patch even if i have gentoo..

[Loke]

Ive now recompiled and reemerged KDE without my customization to the /etc/make.conf FLAGS - and it didnt help

So Im back at square one - with this *really* annoying problem...

[Loke]

Ok - finally some progress.

After discovering KDE is the reason for this laggyness, I did:

rm -rf .kde*

and started KDE again - and the laggyness is officially gone. So somewhere between the clean standard KDE desktop and my highly customized one I introduced something which caused the lagging.

Im providing this info if anyone else have similar problems

[nizZy]

I think i have sorted out the worst "choppiness" now.. I compiled the kernel with support for my VIA chip and the message is like my previous post. Now it doesnt "locks" completely, but still, bad performance..
When i play q3 the processor load is at a steady 95-100% and fps at about 30-40 with "fastest" conf... Ive got an 1.4g T-bird so it shouldnt be like that, right? The choppiness in my case was that DMA wasnt enabled. Or it was enabled but my chipset vasnt supported in kernel. Now it is and DMA is enabled and there is no lockups but still piss performance. I really like gentoo though, I got to sort this out.

Ive got an pentiumIII computer with gentoo too in my wardrobe and that machine has got kinda same problem too. No really good performance.. What can I have done wrong? It worked better with slack.

I have installed both machines from stage1, heard somewhere that it was the best? =)

Can i have done something wrong there? plz HELP

[Malakin]

nizzy, what do you get with this? "hdparm -t /dev/hda"

You could post your /usr/src/linux/.config file here for people to pick at.

I'd suggest trying vanilla sources to see if it helps.

[nizZy]

Well, now I have 45,1 MB/s that should be fine? Before when my chipset wasnt supported in kernel it was really poor.
Yeah I was thinkin of try vanilla too.. I just emerge sys-kernel/vanilla-sources right? Or do I have to unmerge gentoo-sources first? (yeah im a n00b, I know =) )

[cmay4]

I switched to fluxbox, and I still get the problems. I checked the HD access and I am getting ATA100.

On a similar note, shouldn't I be able to listen to an MP3 in xmms while I am compiling? xmms skips HORRIBLY in that situation. Under WinXP, this isn't a problem.

I am starting to think that there is some problem concerning the VIA hardware. I too really love Gentoo, but I don't know how I can continue to use it if I can't solve this problem.

[nizZy]

vanilla didnt make any difference...

cmay4 ==>> what IDE chipset and processor do u have? What are your make.conf settings and kernel processor settings?

just movin the mouse can somtimes load the processor to 20% and dragging the scrollbar in mozilla frequently up to 65%.. this is silly...

my make.conf: (just unmarked second example, nothing more)
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -03 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -03 -pipe"

[Malakin]

[nizZy]

yeah it was lowercase t... But now, when I switched to vanilla i just get 26.34... strange...

Malakin what system do u run? When yer compilin, how big cpuload do u got? Do u play quake3? What fps do u reach?

http://nizzy.hn.org/help/dmesg.txt
http://nizzy.hn.org/help/config.txt
http://nizzy.hn.org/help/make.txt

[nizZy]

Switched back to gentoo-sources.. Gives me;
buffer-cache reads: 194.87 MB/s
disk reads : 45.22 MB/s

At least my disk is fast
But what sould I do with this giant CPU-load and low fps? This is driving me crazy..

[nizZy]

Is my config totally fkd up? Plz tell me if I have done anything wrong..

Is there someone here with a VIA chipset and AMD processor that rocks with gentoo?

[Malakin]

Here's some suggestions. Disable all the agp/drm stuff in your kernel and use nvidia's agp support (it will automatically use it when there's no agpgart). It's important to have MTRR support enabled.