gentoo is eating up all my resources

Chymera · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 9:05 pm Post subject:

I will, just that I had some other problem to work on today, and will probably continue tomorrow. I just bumped into the fstab entry, that's why I posted it.
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Earthwings · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 9:14 pm Post subject:

salmonix · Guru Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 410

Chymera · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:32 am Post subject:

@Sneptune: I finally started trying out what you said....

hdparm -i /dev/sda returned the following:

SnEptUne · l33t Joined: 23 Aug 2004 Posts: 656

honeymak · Guru Joined: 30 Dec 2002 Posts: 537

maybe u have enabled 'beagle' support for ur GUI
that's a system wide indexer which always running and eat your hard disk
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Chymera · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 10:10 pm Post subject:

# hdparm /dev/sda returns

honeymak · Guru Joined: 30 Dec 2002 Posts: 537

maybe u can top it or atop it or dstat or vmstat and see the result
i think maybe u dun do tests under any X env to make it little bit clear

and do u modify kernel? or any special CFLAGS?
becoz sometimes some flags move code and results distorted
too heavily optimised doesn't mean fast......becoz just lead to resources racing
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node@are-b.org · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 44

In fear of being shouted at, or made fun of by the OP i'm going to try to go out on a limb and assist here, I hope I won't get to regret it by being offended.

I actually went as far as to install exaile to see if I can reproduce your problem. So I emerged it, and loaded bout 5k songs give or take into it. First thing I noticed was that indeed, memory usage grew as it was indexing my files, something to be expected. Appearantly exaile likes to keep all song information in memory, that's fine, but expect high memory usage.

So before I start, here's my output of running exaile, with 5k songs imported over NFS (100mbit), audacious streaming ahdjs firefox with 11 tabs open and 7 virtual desktops. I'm running this all on a AMD64 X2 2.4ghz. Since last week i'm actually running gnome nowadays, I used to be using XFCE4.

node@are-b.org · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 44

Update

After having exaile (and the rest of my system) up since then, here's an update top printout.

Chymera · Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:53 pm Post subject:

although I really liked it I have given up exaile, and I am using quodlibet now. However this has done NOTHING to help solve my speed problem. The amount that the music player isn't hoging is now being hoged by either nautilus, firefox or X, or any combination of them. This is outrageous, the good thing is that my computer gets just as slow without compiz as it gets with it, so at least i can enjoy some nice effects until I have to restart.

an other detail I noticed is that my system becomes INCREDIBLY slow after using the gimp (after, as in after I close it), same goes for whenever I have been using a single app extensively and go back to doing other things.... Also nautilus is incredibly bad (turns gray, sometimes needs to be killed) at opening any picture directory with something like 800 files or more, this is really bad for me since I work with a lot of photos

There's no reason to think I might jump you because you're helping me... The reason why I couldn't stand half the people who answered was that they just saw a catchy thread name and jumped to conclusions without even browsing through the first posts... and kept insisting..., too bad that some moderators who seem to also miss the "read the thread" part helped give everybody who takes a look that impression.
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honeymak · Guru Joined: 30 Dec 2002 Posts: 537

what ur cflags and ur cpu arch?
maybe something is not good for u
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kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:04 pm Post subject:

suggestions:

ad firefox-problem: try firefox 3.0beta4 (backup bookmarks before you switch), that'll cut memory usage at least by half

ad python: python-2.4* is fine, I'm using it here with ~amd64 profile (2.5 masked), since apps like bibus don't work with 2.5

ad: gcc-4.1* <-- this compiler is bad IMO, I had some oom / high memory usage experiences with it, I'm using gcc-4.2.3 right now & no such (ok, this baby has 4 GB of ram & snort running but on another old laptop with 1 GB of ram it was fine too), so consider switching to ~amd64 (testing) branch & keeping some if your toolchain at stable - works fine for me
when starting gcc-4.2* you can use -march=native will produce much better code,

ad gcc: consider using -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 and some other save "optimizations" which lets your stuff run better

ad cflags / cxxflags: -march=native -O2 -pipe -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2
should be bare minimum :wink:

now show your teeth, tiger,

good luck

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node@are-b.org · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 44

Maybe the high memory usage is from using a 32bit arch? Should be, but I do remember one of the disadvantages of having a 64 arch is 64 bit pointers, rather then 32bit, double the mem usage!

Well exaile has a memory leak, a small one, but a leak nevertheless.

Natuilus should be able to handle 800 images without a hitch. It might recuire a few seconds to read the directory though, which is based on your diskspeed, so you can't blame nautilus for that. But shouldn't be to crazy long. After it loaded the directory contence, nautilus/gnome-thumbailer will start to thumbnail those images, reading/writing to your disk, but it does so in the background, without hogging nautlius.

I'm also using gcc 4.2.3 out of ~x86 on my Amd64. Though those are minor optimizations, not changes that will reduce your memory footprint by 50%+ ...

Right now, i'm leaning towards a missconfigured video driver, however that would only explain memory usage of the X server, and your speed problems. Then again, if your using compiz, that basically should be fine ..
(glxinfo | grep -i direct should read Direct Rendering Yes or along those lines)

Something is somewhere missconfigured. You did mention running a liveCD version of gentoo/ubuntu was fine? Reinstalling isn't really an option, but do you have some partition with a few gig available to install ubuntu/reinstall your gentoo? See if the memory usage is as insane there aswell. Though ubuntu is a bit bloaty, and slower then your average gentoo, it's still a mighty fine OS. I use it on my laptop exclusisvly nowadays, cause i got fedup with not being able to configure my wireless at school, with wpa enterprise n stuff. Maybe if i installed network-manager on my laptop life will become sweet on gentoo again too, though I like the 'it just works' attitude I have with ubuntu atm. Desktop stays gentoo, no question about it. Though I'll admit I have the ubuntu themes installed

..anyway, drifting offtopic here.

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 8:37 pm Post subject:

Chymera · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 9:28 pm Post subject:

yep, that's what I was planing to say, not to mention it would be stupid to run 32bit on a 64bit system just because some things have minor issues with 64bit.

Especially now I wwant to have a reliable system, without the risk of getting into more trouble then I can handle in a maximum of one afternoon. so I'd rather stick to non-"~" stuff, especially when it's something as serious as a compiler... as for the rest.. I really didn't understand what you were trying to say about nautilus, node. you mean having to wait 5 seconds for a folder to open isn't much? hell, windows XP opens such a folder in max 2 second on a system with one quarter the processing power and half the ram as this one....

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:25 pm Post subject:

Hi Chymera,

first to clear what "ad" means:

Chymera · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:02 pm Post subject:

I still haven't the faintest idea what you're suggesting, were those things you mentioned code? should I add them somewhere? where?

Am I to understand from your last statement that the last kern version has issues?
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guruvan · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Aug 2007 Posts: 132

There's so much fighting on this thread..- admins need bigger LARTs!!
so I didn't read it all, nor did I have specifically relevant suggestions.....just a general one:

When I'm hunting for problems in the machine, I find that the output of top is much more useful in conjunction with the output of "vmstat 5" or "vmstat 1" remember to ignore the first line of output from vmstat as that is cumulative since bootup.

With the two of these running side by side, I can have a much better idea of what part of the machine is being slow (disk, cpu, gpu, net, ram, etc). Further, when I have these somewhat baselined (whether baselined for a well-running system, or a poorly running one) I can then start throwing big known loads at different subsystems to see which one is sluggish. You can then plot the performance with vmstat and see the offending processes simultaneously in top. top is great for finding sporadic bad processes, but not good for deep-rooted problems.

once you know for sure what part of the machine os being slow, it should be much easier to effect some kind of change.

good luck! (if this suggestion doesn't help, just ignore it)
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node@are-b.org · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 44

I totally agree about the nautilus issue. It takes about 1.5 - 2 second to open my home folder (that's including the loading of nautilus) which has about 665 files in it.

Remember, that winXP might be a lil faster, as it doesn't have to render thumbnails, though I'm sure nautilus does that after it loaded the filelisting. I do have a nautilus from ~x86 (and one from the gnome overlay) so some of your issues might be long resolved in the newer nautilus? No idea tbh.

As for ~x86 vs x86 ... ~arch basically says the ebuilds are in testing, not the software itself (generally anyway). Personally I've had more problems with x86 then with ~x86, but that's cause most problems I can troubleshoot (with or without bugs.gentoo.org). x86 seems to sometimes to have issues with combination of packages, due to bad testing/QA.

And then x86 vs amd64 ... Back when I installed this box, which was in 2002? I belive, I didn't have an 64bit capable CPU. I since then just upgraded (copying harddrives when applicable, though these harddisks I've had pre-64bit times).

I think however 64 bit issues are mostly/only with closed source software. Almost all OSS works just fine. 32b/64b issues are usually in regards with drivers (ati has closed 64bit drivers) and flash. There's no 64bit flash. Last time I checked, you had to run a 32bit firefox to use the 32bit flash. win32codecs has a win64codecs replacement nowadays I belive. And then finally, I'm not sure how a 64bit wine works with 32bit software/games. But I agree with you, I could 'upgrade' to 64 bit one of these days without to much fuss I reccon.

Back to your problem however. I know it won't help much, but it's a problem somewhere in your setup, and we still gotta hunt it down

RazielFMX · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 835 Location: NY, USA

Chymera · Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 7:22 pm Post subject:

Could you tell me exactly waht to do / look for? Perhaps in some greater detail? I'm staring at the top output and I really can't make anything out of it except that certain processes eat too much memory at times...
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guruvan · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Aug 2007 Posts: 132

too much is a relative thing:
this is pretty common for how I run my desktops

Chymera · Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2008 7:33 pm Post subject:

As a conclusion to the most pointless thread I've ever made, I can't believe I have a computer which can run stuff like vista blazing fast and I have spent more then two months TRYING to get it to be less-than-sluggish on the self proclaimed fastest linux distribution...

I have nothing against investing time in configuring the system myself as long as it has any purpose, but all I can see for now is that gentoo is just as slow as the ubuntu-bloat and a lot slower than vista, and I'm not even going to mention XP64. Is the linux kernel borken? or is a quad core cpu just too much for it? or is 1gb of ddr2 ram not enough for such a "lightweight" system (actually considering the stuff that gets downloaded by portage gentoo is not lightweight at all)?

Or is it just that some applications (nautilus, firefox, exaile, amarok, quodlibet, OO, compiz, gimp, gnome image viewer, portage, gnome panel, xserver, evolution, epiphany etc.) have problems? Not to mention that I get system crashes at least twice a week and application crashes at least twice a day, and that some applications won't even launch? And yes, I have wasted enough time investigating each and every one of them...

Is everybody else too much of an open source (and all that hippie ideology) zealot to realize that most open source applications are a shipload of bugs, or am the only person in the world for whom besides the obvious advantages of customizability and security everything that goes by the name of linux has proven to be the epitome of poor quality software?
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RazielFMX · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 835 Location: NY, USA