Intel(r) Core?2 Duo Processors"

[John Wendel]

Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 12:28 AM +0200 10/13/06, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> On 12/10/06, Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
>>> I have a Athlon 1.2 GHz 512 MB and it is not slow on FC5, though I'm not
>>> running the same mix as you are.  I think possibly something is not right
>>> on your system.  Does top show a high load, or indicate that the system is
>>> swapping?  Perhaps the disks are fragmented -- EXT2/3 data structures don't
>>> suffer much from fragmentation, but the file data does.
>> This is top:
>>
>> top - 00:26:49 up 15:35,  1 user,  load average: 0.77, 0.61, 0.67
> 
> Load seems low enough.
> 
>> Tasks: 110 total,   1 running, 109 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
>> Cpu(s):  2.7% us,  0.7% sy,  0.0% ni, 96.3% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
>> Mem:   1002168k total,   952200k used,    49968k free,    42264k buffers
>> Swap:  1413648k total,    18460k used,  1395188k free,   575176k cached
> 
> Not using much swap.
> 
>>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>> 4433 root      15   0 98.6m  56m 4944 S  1.3  5.8 347:19.29 Xorg
>> 10572 dotancoh  16   0 32148  15m  11m S  1.0  1.6   0:01.07 konsole
>> 4829 dotancoh  15   0 25544 3684 1752 S  0.7  0.4   2:02.78 dcopserver
>> 5298 dotancoh  15   0 37460  22m  16m S  0.3  2.3   2:58.72 kicker
>> 10574 dotancoh  16   0  2192 1112  856 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.05 top
>>    1 root      16   0  1568  532  460 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.46 init
>>    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
>>    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
>>    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
>>    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.34 events/0
>>    6 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 khelper
>>    7 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
>>    9 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.16 kblockd/0
>>   10 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
>>  105 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.24 pdflush
>>  106 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.76 pdflush
>>  108 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
>>
>> How can I check fragmentation. Googling the subject makes me beleive
>> that this is not the case in general with Linux.
> 
> The common wisdom is that EXT2/3 are not affected by fragmentation, but
> without much real-world proof that this is so.  The EXT2/3 filesystem
> metadata was designed to be not much affected by fragmentation, but that
> says little about the file data.  I read an article / webpage (that I can't
> find right now) by someone who decided to experiment with new and used EXT2
> filesystems, and found a substatial slowdown.  He was inspired to try this
> because he noticed that his computer sped up when given a fresh filesystem.
> You could try backing up and restoring to a fresh filesystem.  If you
> spring for a new computer you'll back up and restore to the new computer.
> Either way you'll get a fresh new filesystem.


Look at the Xorg Time. Doesn't 347:19.29 with an uptime of 15:35 seem 
extremely high? On my box, X uses about 4 minutes / hour of uptime.

And the load averages on most of the desktops I use are mostly in the 
0.1 - 0.3 range. This box has something eating CPU. I don't think the 
file system is the problem.

Regards,

John