OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 18, 2005 Sorry about the duplicate untitled post, I'm not sure where my mind was. Hey all, I'm having some annoying problems with my work machine. Specs: NEC Powermate 2000 PIII 600 128 MB Ram 18 GB HD The machine is an all in one machine with a flat panel monitor built into it. The monitor base houses all components. Problem: This machine is slow! Very very very slow! I'm currently running Ubuntu Warty Warthog, but I previously ran SuSE 8.2 and Yoper 2.1 on it with the same issues. It used to have windows 98 on it but I formatted it off. The problem did not occur in windows but all linux distros run extremely slowly. GNOME is unbearably slow. WindowMaker even is slow - 2-4 seconds just to open the Applications menu by right clicking on the desktop. Up to a minute to switch between Firefox and Openoffice, which is extruciating. What could the problem be? I enabled Unix large disk access mode in the bios but it didn't help, neither did enableing and disabling DMA. There is a 800 MB swap partition also... Anyone know why this machine is so slow? Share this post Link to post
matttah 0 Posted April 20, 2005 What do you mean by slow? As in it loads slow? Graphics are slow? If your graphics are slow you might have your x config'd wrong...if it is running very slow try running in a non graphical mode(you can kill x by hitting ctrl alt backspace). See if it runs slow there too. If it does most likely the way you are installing is correct. I am not too familiar with the distros you listed but any distro should be able to run pretty well at the command line in a non graphical mode. Daum Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 20, 2005 Everything is slow. Typing, everything. But only when I'm in a windowed environment. Everything works fast in command line only though. Still, I run Ubuntu on a much lesser system at home, and it works quite fast. Here, clicking on the Applications menu can take up to a minute for disk activity to cease and then the menu finally pops up, then it works fast until I open a program from one of the submenus. These can take up to 10 minutes to load, especially firefox and openoffice. But even nautilus takes 30 seconds or so. The performance is equally bad in minimalist window managers, WindowMaker, Blackbox, etc. Moving windows is smooth, once I can grab them (takes a sec but then they move fine). It just seems like everything is proceeded by a long delay full of hard drive activity. Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted April 20, 2005 Two issues right off the top. An increase in ram would be useful, as 128 mb is bare minimum to run thse distros. 256 would be much better. Secondly, is the swap space being utilized at all? Is it in your fstab file? Finally, in the bios, is PNP OS disabled or off in the bios (PNP configuration)? Share this post Link to post
martouf 0 Posted April 20, 2005 when it's being slow, can you open a terminal and type [size:4][tt]cat /proc/interrupts[/tt][/color] then count off three seconds and type [size:4][tt]cat /proc/interrupts[/tt][/color] once more, then post the output here? Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 20, 2005 brant@Ubuntu:~ $ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 705817760 XT-PIC timer 1: 167400 XT-PIC i8042 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 5: 18583317 XT-PIC uhci_hcd, Intel 82801AA-ICH, yenta, ndiswrapper 7: 16764342 XT-PIC parport0 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 10: 11701 XT-PIC yenta, eth0 12: 2882571 XT-PIC i8042 14: 1676441 XT-PIC ide0 15: 4353844 XT-PIC ide1 NMI: 0 Fstab shows a swap partition, and it looks normal I run the exact same distro on a Compaq Armada Laptop PII 266 64 MB Ram 8 GB HD and it works much better than on this machine. and here is the stuff you asked for martouf LOC: 698818929 ERR: 0 MIS: 0 brant@Ubuntu:~ $ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 705822926 XT-PIC timer 1: 167409 XT-PIC i8042 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 5: 18583395 XT-PIC uhci_hcd, Intel 82801AA-ICH, yenta, ndiswrapper 7: 16764342 XT-PIC parport0 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 10: 11701 XT-PIC yenta, eth0 12: 2882571 XT-PIC i8042 14: 1676908 XT-PIC ide0 15: 4353898 XT-PIC ide1 NMI: 0 LOC: 698824044 ERR: 0 MIS: 0 brant@Ubuntu:~ $ Share this post Link to post
martouf 0 Posted April 21, 2005 hmm.. [size:4][tt]$ dc 705822926 705817760 - p 5166[/tt][/color] timer interrupts processed. Not that many other interrupts between the two interrupt count samples. Guess this machine is networked via ndiswrapper, because eth0 didn't have any interrupts. what version of ndiswrapper are you using? where is the display driver? it should be shown hooked into one of the interrupt lines. thought you said the machine runs slowly when X is running and not so badly otherwise... would you provide the output of [size:4][tt]free[/tt][/color] ? we'll be able to see how the system memory (RAM + swap) is configured. Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 21, 2005 Yep, both my older laptop and this machine are using a WPC54G wireless card with ndiswrapper. I'm sure its a recent version as Ubuntu comes with in in the kernel of as a kernel module. Not sure why there isn't a display driver listed, I was running Open Office and Firefox at the time in X so .... What do you mean the output of free - is it a command I'm not familiar with? Share this post Link to post
martouf 0 Posted April 21, 2005 you ought to find the ndiswrapper version information in the output of [size:4][tt]dmesg[/tt][/color]. try: [size:4][tt]dmesg | grep ndis[/tt][/color] for memory config, there's [size:4][tt]free[/tt][/color] and [size:4][tt]procinfo[/tt][/color]. procinfo gives a nicely concise memory and interrupt report. free gives just the memory report. ( raw data may be obtained using: [size:4][tt]cat /proc/interrupts cat /proc/meminfo[/tt][/color] ) Share this post Link to post
martouf 0 Posted April 21, 2005 oh, about the lack of display driver hooked to an interrupt: it means you're not using an accelerated driver. Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 21, 2005 dmesg | grep ndis completes with no output. I should't be using an accelerated driver as this card doesn't support it. Output of free is: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 126184 122256 3928 0 672 33276 -/+ buffers/cache: 88308 37876 Swap: 437432 121408 316024 cat /proc/meminfo gives me MemTotal: 126184 kB MemFree: 3340 kB Buffers: 544 kB Cached: 33772 kB SwapCached: 27988 kB Active: 82864 kB Inactive: 3640 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 126184 kB LowFree: 3340 kB SwapTotal: 437432 kB SwapFree: 315892 kB Dirty: 0 kB Writeback: 0 kB Mapped: 81388 kB Slab: 21476 kB Committed_AS: 412812 kB PageTables: 1468 kB VmallocTotal: 909232 kB VmallocUsed: 3584 kB VmallocChunk: 905476 kB Swap seems smaller than I thought but still should be fine I'd think Share this post Link to post
martouf 0 Posted April 21, 2005 huh.. really? here's what I've got on my test system: [size:4][tt]$ dmesg | grep ndis ndiswrapper version 0.6+CVS loaded[/tt][/color] (second command run as root, many distros don't allow regular users to read /var/log/messages) [size:4][tt]# grep ndis /var/log/messages Apr 21 14:58:33 testsys kernel: ndiswrapper version 0.6+CVS loaded[/tt][/color] Ok, no accelerated display driver. confirmed. good - it had the potential to be the source of the problem. unlikely, but potential. the swap config looks OK. Nothing looks bad there. the one big difference between your system and mine is the really large number of LOC interrupts. Mine is 0. Even after millions and millions of timer interrupts. it's the local interrupt counter in the APIC. your APIC must be on. hmmm.. have you (or would you) try booting with "noapic" ? booting with both "noapic" and "nolapic" ? Share this post Link to post
blackpage 0 Posted April 22, 2005 gidday ppl I would almost place a bet on martouf's last two lines. booting into "noapic"-mode could indeed solve the slow response times (I dimly remember this issue from my Mandrake times). good luck, and if it helps, buy martouf a beer Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 22, 2005 I booted with noapic and no|apic did I do something wrong here? brant@Ubuntu:~ $ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 199274 XT-PIC timer 1: 49 XT-PIC i8042 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 5: 10269 XT-PIC uhci_hcd, Intel 82801AA-ICH, yenta, ndiswrapper 7: 0 XT-PIC parport0 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 10: 11 XT-PIC yenta, eth0 12: 903 XT-PIC i8042 14: 7384 XT-PIC ide0 15: 719 XT-PIC ide1 NMI: 0 LOC: 199210 ERR: 0 MIS: 0 I went to the grub menu, hit e to edit the boot option after kernel blahblah.386 ro splash I added noapic and no|apic then hit b to boot Did I mess up or do it wrong? Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted April 22, 2005 Try noapic first only. Then if that does not work nolapic only. That is nolapic...the letter l with no spaces. Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 25, 2005 the letter I as in EYE? or the char | obtained by pressing the Shift + \ key? Share this post Link to post
martouf 0 Posted April 26, 2005 the letter you need to use (in ITU phonetics) is "Lima" Alpha == A Bravo == B Charlie == C Delta == D Echo == E . . and so on.. . . Lima == L nolapic ::= Nancy Oscar Lima Alpha Papa India Charlie ok? Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted April 27, 2005 Hehe ok, thanks I feel reaaaalllly smart now. Share this post Link to post
OldSpiceAP 0 Posted May 3, 2005 Update! It worked! Thanks so much! I owe martouf a beer for sure! Visit Kansas sometime and feel free to take me up on it! Share this post Link to post