coverup Posted January 30, 2008 Report Share Posted January 30, 2008 My Mandriva 2008 laptop noticably slows down at random times, so that I could see the mouse pointer jumping from place to place rather than moving smoothly, or a key "getting stuck" for a short moment. Also, I think, this also coincides with the fans kicking in. The laptop is currently running from AC power and the kpowersave policy is "Performance" which also includes Dynamic speedstepping policy. I don't run any power hungry applications, only Firefox, Emacs and a couple of xdvi-k sessions, Compiz, screensaver and other graphic effects such as launchfeedback, window animations, etc are disabled. The CD tray is empty as well. I wonder what causes the laptop to slow down, and how to make it run run smoothly? It's one of the latest laptops, 2.2Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2Gb memory, there must be plenty of resource. [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted January 31, 2008 Report Share Posted January 31, 2008 try to note when this occurs and see if there is any sort of timing to it (every 10 minutes, half hour, etc.). i know you say it's random but sometimes there is a pattern there :). also, when this occurs (fans spin up, things slow down) open a terminal (konsole in KDE, gnome-terminal in GNOME), run top and note any items that appear to be using a lot of CPU (they should be at the top of the list). This while help to see if there's a program running that is causing it. let us know if you have any questions and post back with any results, thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted January 31, 2008 Report Share Posted January 31, 2008 Is there anything of interest in /var/log/messages? I wish I could help more but all of my laptop experience is with (K)Ubuntu. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 31, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 31, 2008 I found that intermittent pauses occur during /caused by some harddrive activity, when the harddisk LED stays up for a second or so, and I even can feel the vibration. No messages are dumped into /var/log/messages during those activities. I would really like to know what is causing those pauses. As for the pattern, it is hard to say... I was typing some stuff in Emacs earlier today and the pauses occurred every few minutes or so, but now when I am typing this post, there does not seem to be any. However, I disabled Lisa, NFS and a couple of other services. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted January 31, 2008 Report Share Posted January 31, 2008 Did you check the top command to see if there were any processes taking up resources? It also may be the file indexing program, I'm not sure if Mandriva still includes that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 31, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 31, 2008 I turned off indexing the very first boot into the KDE. The processes that topped the list were artsd, firefox, (these were always on top), and also ksoftirqd, mysqld, hald, net_applet, ifplugd, X, scsi_eh_1, ata/0. I went further in my investigation and turned off a bunch of services I think I don't need: lisa, mysqld, nfs-common and nfs-server, openvpn, portmap, postfix, resolvconf, and winbind. That calmed the system down a bit, I could even hear fans slowing down for a short while, and the harddisk LED stopped flashing. Maybe I did do something right.... Services I am not certain about are * cups - do I need it running just to be able to print from the laptop? I print to a LAN printer * netfs - I don't know what it does, the description says it mounts all SMB and NFS mount points. I don't use NFS or SMB at the moment, but may ocasionally need to use SMB. Worth netfs running? * nscd - I cannot understand the info. Something about passwords and groups lookups. * partmon - Is it really useful? * resolvconf - I turned it off, but what does it really do? * winbind - again, it has something to do with SMB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted February 1, 2008 Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 cups - yes, you need it to print, even to a LAN printer. nscd - essentially, everytime you go to a website it asks a nameserver (DNS) what the IP address of that website is. NSCD caches this information so that the system doesn't have to ask for it everytime you visit a website. If you have slow nameservers or want to minimize network traffic it may be useful, but most users won't notice any difference whether this is on or off (neither should it have any real impact on system performance). resolvconf: The resolvconf program is only necessary when a system has multiple programs that need to dynamically modify the nameserver information. In a simple system where the nameservers do not change often or are only changed by one program, the resolv.conf configuration file is adequate.Since this is a laptop, I assume you aren't running any servers or doing any funky name server stuff I highly doubt you need it. netfs and winbind you can probably safely turn off, though if you try to connect to SMB shares and it doesn't work start them back up. I am, however, pretty sure neither is necessary as I've accessed SMB shares on systems without either of these services. i'm not sure about partmon... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted February 1, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 Thanks, tyme. Much appreciate. My dhcp servers bot at work and home write DNS server information into /etc/resolv.conf. No reason to keep resolvconf running. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 1, 2008 Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 What other services you got enabled? chkconfig --list | grep :on then we can see what's enabled using the :on and filtering it. Also, you can disable avahi-daemon, since you won't use this. It's the old mDNSResponder service that deals with zeroconf stuff - and in home networks you definitely don't use it - never really seen it in use when in the office either, although I'm sure there are some scenarios for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted February 1, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 Here we go: # chkconfig --list | grep :on acpi 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off acpid 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off alsa 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off apmd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off atd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off avahi-daemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off consolekit 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off cpufreq 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off crond 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off cups 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off dkms 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off dm 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off haldaemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off harddrake 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off iptables 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off jexec 0:on 1:on 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:on keytable 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off kheader 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off laptop-mode 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off mandi 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off messagebus 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off netfs 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off network 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off network-up 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off nscd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off partmon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off shorewall 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off sound 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off sshd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off syslog 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off I am booting into X (initlevel 5). I was thinking of stoppng avahi-daemon, but then I looked at the output of route -n: Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 35 0 0 wlan0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 35 0 0 wlan0 127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 35 0 0 wlan0 Note that wlan0 is given the route to the subnet 169.254.0.0. I guess this subnet is used as a fallback when the primary interface eth0 is up. Is it what avahi for (sorry for the lame question)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 1, 2008 Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 Something I found on zeroconf: http://zeroconf.sourceforge.net/ could explain the IP thing. I've never found a use for this, so always turned it off. But it could explain giving that 169 range like Windows does if DHCP doesn't get an IP. Previous versions, the service was called mDNSResponder. You can also disable iptables mandi shorewall if you're not using the firewall stuff - since if you're behind a firewall/router you wouldn't need these in theory. netfs you won't need unless you're using NFS. Since you don't have portmap installed which is also required for NFS, then you can disable this service safely. You can also disable nscd if you wish, as tyme mentioned the caching might or might not benefit - and if you're router/gateway/firewall is your DNS server in your IP configuration, this will most likely already be caching stuff anyway as it'll be proxying all DNS requests to the internet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted February 1, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 Thanks, Ian. I have stopped avahi, netfs and ncsd too. Will see what the result will be. Thanks everybody. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 1, 2008 Report Share Posted February 1, 2008 The only other thing that could be causing it is the cpufreq service, if for some bizarre reason it's got some weird frequency scaling config that's a little too sensitive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted February 2, 2008 Report Share Posted February 2, 2008 Does mandriva use laptop_mode or any form of hdd power management/sleep? This exact thing happens to me when I set my drive to spin down after X minutes of inactivity. I've got pretty aggressive power saving settings as my battery is old and I get a pause when the hdd spins up again. Whatever program was trying to read from it is effectively put on hold while the drive spins up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 2, 2008 Report Share Posted February 2, 2008 Yep, there is a laptop-mode service listed above, so it could also be this too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.