Something is grinding D9 to a halt!

[bw123]

You can look for pkg strangeness with apt-show-versions

Two I might start with are these...

Code: Select all

apt-show-versions | grep -i 'No available version'
apt-show-versions | grep -i 'Newer than'

[pendrachken]

Looks like a combo of having not enough RAM ( looks like 4GB total ) and then hitting a slow swap device.


Either upgrade your RAM amounts if possible, or keep fewer tabs open when you go to sites that are memory / CPU intensive. Close as many tabs as possible when working with excel sheets too, depending on the dataset that can chew through RAM like crazy too, which would cause you to need to swap.


Once the machine starts getting unresponsive look at your "free" command memory report, I bet you will see the swap used memory starting to fill up.

You may be able to work around this problem a small amount if you find it's due to swapping by adjusting how aggressive the kernel is with purging old memory tables and how fast it swaps. You would have to do some research on how to adjust this, and I recommend trying the options out "live" before committing them to config files.

[Wheelerof4te]

It's definitely my browser.

Yes, Firefox ESR 52.7 slows my laptop to a crawl, too. Especially when playing Youtube. My advice would be to switch to Chromium (Chrome if you don't mind Google) or get Firefox Quantum as described in here:
https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#Firefox ... nd_Nightly
4 GB of RAM might be enough depending on what you're doing. Playing Steam games while at the same time doing some other work won't cut it. But this is Linux, so you can just switch to MATE or XFCE. Even KDE is much lighter than GNOME these days.

[n_hologram]

rhino: I had an issue last year with a process that wasn't showing up as one would expect. The clue was in the kernel threads. You may find this useful: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 46#p644523

EDIT: Just remembered, you may want to run a program like tcptrack (my preference) to monitor network connections. If it's really a browser-based issue, there may be some malware, or at the least, unwanted connections. You can monitor if there's a buttload of network traffic from any ip addresses.

Other thoughts...

...With excel files and email, the same problem exists while trying to save a file or check for email.

You said earlier that the problem is "definitely with your browser." I'm assuming you mean, this is only an issue for these other programs when your browser is open. If not, clarify.

Dmesg shows nothing unusual.

How did you determine there is nothing unusual? No output was given to us.
While you're at it, it would also be helpful to share...
-CPU and memory statistics before, during, and after closing a browsing session
-The output of lspci -vv, as root

[rhino777]

Hi. Thanks all. I checked dmesg, and it's the same as it's always been.

I think I might be about to should bingo!

I seem to remember adjusting swapiness to 0. So I'm going to try changing it until I can increase physical ram, and perhaps that's the solution.

I'll let you know.

Thanks so much!

[debiman]

It's definitely my browser.

While trying to get to https://creativemarket.com/ the whole system almost locked up. (I had eight tabs open at the time in Chrome... doesn't sound like too much to me. Especially since all eight were finished loading...)

some never finish loading if you have javascript enabled by default.

but however insanely resource-hungry some web pages are, it shouldn't grind your machine to a complete halt.
unless...

I seem to remember adjusting swapiness to 0.

hrrmph.
you should have mentioned that in post #1.

[rhino777]

Sorry. I said I would tell you if I've done something... because... I couldn't remember what I'd done.

So thanks everyone. You jogged my memory.

I've yet to have a repeat of The Grind.

[rhino777]

Okay. It's seems to have made a difference. I changed swappiness.

In addition, I went into /etc/init.d and deleted a few start up services I don't need on a constant basis. For example, Apache2.

Still, there seems to be a long lag between logging in and the appearance of the desktop. 10 to 15 seconds feels like a long time to me.

[kevinthefixer]

Still, there seems to be a long lag between logging in and the appearance of the desktop. 10 to 15 seconds feels like a long time to me.

For a slow Celeron? What desktop are you loading? Unfortunately your posts seem to lack important details. FWIW my memory often fails me in situations like this, so I try to take copious notes while configuring a system. I have an older Toshiba netbook with a Celeron single-core, it takes about that long to load the XFCE desktop under Stretch. For a dual-core to load Gnome, not that excessive. BTW you might double the size of your swap partition, might help. Another suggestion; after all this tinkering, format all the partitions and do a clean install with a lightweight desktop. That will take care of any other maladjustments you might have still lingering. Here is the lightest DE I know of:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/r ... i-desktop/
It's Stretch with LXDE modified for minimal hardware. The original RPi was single-core and 1/2-gig RAM, it worked on that, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation ported it back to x86. Sorry no 64-bit but you'll never notice.

[debiman]

FWIW my memory often fails me in situations like this, so I try to take copious notes while configuring a system.

this.
nothing helps to solve the problem like going through the steps one by one, trying to explain them in full detail.
most forum posts remain unsolved because the op never bothers to supply detailed info.

For a dual-core to load Gnome, not that excessive.

...and this.