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fresh stretch install very slow performance

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joshim
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fresh stretch install very slow performance

#1 Post by joshim »

Hi everyone,

I just installed Debian 9 on a Samsung Ativ NP905S3G (64 bit). Install went fine, but after about 5 mins of use the machine becomes so slow it’s unusable. Can anyone give me some suggestions of how to diagnose the problem and fix?

Thanks

arzgi
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#2 Post by arzgi »

Open terminal and use top to see which processes consume most cpu and memory resources.


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stevepusser
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#4 Post by stevepusser »

Giving us some idea of the system state & hardware is very often useful, too. One way to do this is to install inxi and provide the result of

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inxi -r -F
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#5 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Or

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lspci -knn
apt policy
is also good :)

https://wiki.debian.org/HowToIdentifyADevice/PCI
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pendrachken
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#6 Post by pendrachken »

From what I can fins in a 30 second search is you have an AMD A6 APU and 4GB RAM. It's never going to be screaming fast. Ever.

That said, you may not have a swap partition set up? 4GB RAM is going to need a swap partition, no matter what. Especially if running a web browser.
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#7 Post by stevepusser »

pendrachken wrote:From what I can fins in a 30 second search is you have an AMD A6 APU and 4GB RAM. It's never going to be screaming fast. Ever.

That said, you may not have a swap partition set up? 4GB RAM is going to need a swap partition, no matter what. Especially if running a web browser.
But it seems to be running OK when started up...so we need to see the state of the machine when it starts bogging down, which "inxi -F" can show to some degree.
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#8 Post by Lysander »

pendrachken wrote:From what I can fins in a 30 second search is you have an AMD A6 APU and 4GB RAM. It's never going to be screaming fast. Ever.

That said, you may not have a swap partition set up? 4GB RAM is going to need a swap partition, no matter what. Especially if running a web browser.
A lot of it has to do with what DE the user is running and the applications they run.

I have run Debian 9.4 on a 1.6Ghz single-core Atom and it was totally workable since it was running LXDE. Granted, application compromises have to be made on lower-end CPUs [e.g. running lightweight browsers, dedicated YouTube clients etc] but, from what I can see, the A6 is not that low-spec and should be totally fine to work with as long as OP has his system set up correctly.

I also don't think it's true to say 4GB RAM is going to need swap "no matter what". My main rig has 5GB RAM but hardly ever creeps up over 4GB unless I run a lot of things on multiple desktops at once. So while swap is definitely advisable, I would caution saying that it is needed "no matter what" on 4GB RAM. If the user if just browsing the web and using Libre Office I doubt they will ever breach the 2GB line, esp if they are running a lightweight DE. Much of it is relative to the system and what the user is doing.

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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#9 Post by pendrachken »

stevepusser wrote:
pendrachken wrote:From what I can fins in a 30 second search is you have an AMD A6 APU and 4GB RAM. It's never going to be screaming fast. Ever.

That said, you may not have a swap partition set up? 4GB RAM is going to need a swap partition, no matter what. Especially if running a web browser.
But it seems to be running OK when started up...so we need to see the state of the machine when it starts bogging down, which "inxi -F" can show to some degree.

The "after 5 minutes of use the machine grinds to a halt" is what makes me think ran out of RAM, and no swap. Sounds like the machine is desperately trying to find RAM that can be dumped and used for newer applications due to not having swap set up / swapiness set wrong.
I'm not around here much, but that was the problem of the last guy I helped out too. Same basic issue - ran good at start, used the PC, and then it ground to a halt. He had set up the swapiness to basically never swap and forgot about it.
Lysander wrote: A lot of it has to do with what DE the user is running and the applications they run.

I have run Debian 9.4 on a 1.6Ghz single-core Atom and it was totally workable since it was running LXDE. Granted, application compromises have to be made on lower-end CPUs [e.g. running lightweight browsers, dedicated YouTube clients etc] but, from what I can see, the A6 is not that low-spec and should be totally fine to work with as long as OP has his system set up correctly.

I also don't think it's true to say 4GB RAM is going to need swap "no matter what". My main rig has 5GB RAM but hardly ever creeps up over 4GB unless I run a lot of things on multiple desktops at once. So while swap is definitely advisable, I would caution saying that it is needed "no matter what" on 4GB RAM. If the user if just browsing the web and using Libre Office I doubt they will ever breach the 2GB line, esp if they are running a lightweight DE. Much of it is relative to the system and what the user is doing.


FF / Chrome will hit 2GB easily at idle with only a few tabs sitting around and basic adblocking extensions running. This is ignoring any other extensions the user wants / needs. Actively using the browser, especially for video sites or other interactive sites will slurp up the rest of the RAM right quick. It doesn't matter how light your desktop is. A light desktop might gain you one more tab in RAM saved... maybe.

Can you run a desktop with a modern browser on 4GB RAM and no swap? Yeah, if you close down all other applications and only use at most 1-2 tabs. Having a swap file / partition would be tremendously helpful though.
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#10 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

pendrachken wrote:Can you run a desktop with a modern browser on 4GB RAM and no swap? Yeah, if you close down all other applications and only use at most 1-2 tabs. Having a swap file / partition would be tremendously helpful though.
Here's my Debian stretch desktop running firefox (with 10 tabs open), blender (with a scene loaded), GIMP, a few xterms and Mitsuba (eating all the processor cycles) and we're at just over 1GiB used out of 4GiB total:

Image

^ Look Ma, no swap!

And yes, the machine (ThinkPad X201) is still responsive, although it is lagging a little bit :mrgreen:

EDIT: the Mitsuba render is finished: https://scrot.moe/image/9txae ← a copper ring showing a diacaustic effect (bidirectional path tracer, 512 samples per pixel) :)
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joshim
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#11 Post by joshim »

Thank you all for the help.

I think it was a lack of swap. I reinstalled and upped the swap and it seems to be running fine now. Also that

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    inxi -r -F
is very useful.

I had some other questions re power consumption and fn keys for this laptop, can I post them here or search/start another thread?

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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#12 Post by stevepusser »

So...you aren't going to let us know what inxi showed? Were you running out of RAM? If your machine had to resort to swap, it's going to bog down no matter what, being that a disc is a kazillion times slower than RAM, so just adding swap shouldn't make any real difference---what you want is to avoid using it if at all possible, which can be tuned somewhat by changing your "swappiness" settings.
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#13 Post by Lysander »

stevepusser wrote:So...you aren't going to let us know what inxi showed? Were you running out of RAM? If your machine had to resort to swap, it's going to bog down no matter what, being that a disc is a kazillion times slower than RAM, so just adding swap shouldn't make any real difference---what you want is to avoid using it if at all possible, which can be tuned somewhat by changing your "swappiness" settings.
(Emphasis my own).

Very interesting. For comparison [ditto HoaS], I'm currently running GNOME with Spotify and Chromium [with nine tabs open] at 2.8 GB/5GB RAM. Swap is at 0GB/5GB, of course. It's interesting that if swap was the only thing that eased the system for OP then yes, problems are going to come up in other ways too [I realise this is actually a rather basic point, in retrospect, but I found it interesting nevertheless].

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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#14 Post by HuangLao »

Something smells fishy...why not post the "interesting" results of your inxi -r -F? Were you surprised by what it found?

joshim
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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#15 Post by joshim »

stevepusser wrote:So...you aren't going to let us know what inxi showed? Were you running out of RAM? If your machine had to resort to swap, it's going to bog down no matter what, being that a disc is a kazillion times slower than RAM, so just adding swap shouldn't make any real difference---what you want is to avoid using it if at all possible, which can be tuned somewhat by changing your "swappiness" settings.
Ah okay. Here’s the inxi output:

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Kernel: 4.9.0-6-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit)
           Desktop: Gnome 3.22.3 Distro: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)
Machine:   Device: laptop System: SAMSUNG product: 905S3G/906S3G/915S3G v: P03RBV
           Mobo: SAMSUNG model: NP905S3G-K02UK v: SAMSUNG_SW__1234567890ABCD
           BIOS: American Megatrends v: P03RBV.061.130704.FL date: 07/04/2013
Battery    BAT1: charge: 30.7 Wh 93.0% condition: 33.0/40.8 Wh (81%)
CPU:       Quad core (up to ) (-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB 
           clock speeds: max: 1000 MHz 1: 900 MHz 2: 600 MHz 3: 600 MHz
           4: 700 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Temash [Radeon HD 8250/8280G]
           Display Server: X.Org 1.19.2 drivers: ati,vesa (unloaded: modesetting,fbdev,radeon)
           Resolution: 1366x768@0.00hz
           GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.9, 128 bits)
           GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 13.0.6
Audio:     Card-1 Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller
           driver: snd_hda_intel
           Card-2 Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Kabini HDMI/DP Audio
           driver: snd_hda_intel
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.9.0-6-amd64
Network:   Card-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169
           IF: enp1s0 state: down mac: 18:67:b0:4b:4e:d6
           Card-2: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter
           driver: ath9k
           IF: wlp2s0 state: up mac: 48:d2:24:35:a5:5c
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 128.0GB (16.0% used)
           ID-1: /dev/sda model: SAMSUNG_MZMTD128 size: 128.0GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 22G used: 4.2G (21%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda1
           ID-2: /home size: 71G used: 9.3G (14%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda8
           ID-3: /var size: 19G used: 422M (3%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda5
           ID-4: /tmp size: 1.3G used: 4.0M (1%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda7
           ID-5: swap-1 size: 6.00GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda6
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 65.6C mobo: 65.0C
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Repos:     Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list
           deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
           deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
           deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
           deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
           deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
           deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
Info:      Processes: 187 Uptime: 13 min Memory: 1549.8/3394.8MB
           Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.3.5 
It’s been a few days of solid use, several hours at a time and it hasn’t slowed down like before.

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Re: fresh stretch install very slow performance

#16 Post by kevinthefixer »

That shows you're only using <1/2 of your RAM and none of your swap. Don't see how adding swap made any difference. Did you make any other changes, perhaps changing swappiness? Or vm.vfs_cache_pressure? I have a similar system, a Dell Lat E4300, that outruns hellhounds with only 4GB RAM. It runs Stretch XFCE.

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