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Mandriva 2008 power management


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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]

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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)?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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