[SOLVED] Gnome-shell soft lockup with high load

[madhatter]

I'm having problems with soft lockups, when load is somwhat-high the entire system generally becomes very sluggish. Just 15mins ago, I had fired up a virtual machine, system starts accessing disk and soon after became increasingly unresponsive, and then just stopped altogether, all I could do was move the mouse around... yesterday this happened too, whilst editing pics with gimp. The only solution when this happens, is to Ctrl+Alt+Bksp, which is hardly a solution, I lose work and everything I had open. What I'm really wondering here is, why does Fedora not handle the load properly? This machine is setup with two other operating systems(Windows, and OSX[no, it's not a mac]), and while it is true during times of heavy disk access the machine will generally become slower, but only in the Linux world does it become absolutely unusable, something is definitely wrong when a totally unsupported OS(osx in this case) is handling load better than an OS made for this hardware. My CPU is a quad-core 3ghz, I'm failing to understand the reason here.

I'm also noticing in System Monitor, RAM usage is extremely low, I have 4GB (ddr2-1066) installed, and I've never seen the usage go above 2GB(even with a virtual machine running taking 1GB!), instead I see swap space being utilized... it does seem like it's trying its very hardest to make minimal use of my RAM, this is extremely frustrating, I'd like for everything to be thrown into RAM and left alone until it absolutely needs clearing up, I don't want or need it treating my system as if I have 256mb or some other measly low amount. I'm frequently finding going AFK for periods of time, coming back and even my browser isn't in RAM, wasting yet another minute or so.

Is there anything I can do to tweak this behavior, I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty with command line, or even recompiling the kernel, any suggestions are welcome.

System:
FC 17 x86_64
Kernel 3.4.0-1.fc17.x86_64

[nonamedotc]

There used to be a yum/packagekit bug in F15 and I think I saw in F16 also. I believe yum backend was hogging CPU there. Have you left it for sometime -say a few minutes and seen if system monitor shows 100% on CPU (after it recovers)?

I think that bug was supposedly fixed with a packagekit update ... May be the same issue? Just a thought ..

[george_toolan]

It's a feature and not a bug ;-)

What kind of virtual machines are you using? Vmware or VirtualBox?

But you should definitely buy more RAM which is really inexpensive at the moment.

Alternatively you could install a SSD, which are also great for swapping.

You might want to fiddle with the swappiness setting. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sw...I_change_it.3F

Use at your own risk ;-)

I have a feeling this is getting worse with 3.3.8+ kernels:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      16403868   13920176    2483692          0     211360   11791672
-/+ buffers/cache:    1917144   14486724
Swap:     16777208      53456   16723752

When I try to copy a small file to an external drive it starts swapping first, because I only have 14 GiB "free" memory. How stupid is that?

[nonamedotc]

On the other hand, see my computer's memory usage when I am running Virtualbox (that is updating windows).

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          5865       4395       1470          0         83        982
-/+ buffers/cache:       3329       2536
Swap:         6141          0       6141

When I run matlab,

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          5865       2311       3553          0         83        935
-/+ buffers/cache:       1293       4572
Swap:         6141          0       6141

I do not have processes using swap before RAM.

uname -r
3.4.2-4.fc17.x86_64

Something is clearly not right!

[madhatter]

Thanks for the suggestions For now I changed the swappiness value to 10, from default 60. (seems like a ridiculously high default >_>)

[madhatter]

Perfect, along with swappiness I made one other change, appended 'noatime' to fstab, now I can say the system is just as, if not more responsive than Windows/OSX, this is what I was looking for this entire time, and from now will be the first thing I do on any fresh install (for desktop OS atleast). Thanks!