Extremely slow machine

[shahdharmit]

Hello,

I run F12. Since some days my laptop has become very sluggish. In Mozilla, switching between the tabs takes like seconds instead of fraction of a second. Also minimizing and mximizing windows takes long. Switching between the windows too takes long. Now I can't see the cursor while typing this post.

I disabled some services that start at the boot time. I'm posting a list of services that are on in the runlevel 5 as that's the one I use.

chkconfig | grep 5:on
NetworkManager 	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
abrtd          	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:off	5:on	6:off
acpid          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
akmods         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
auditd         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
avahi-daemon   	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
cpuspeed       	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
crond          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
haldaemon      	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ip6tables      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iptables       	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
irqbalance     	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iscsi          	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iscsid         	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
libvirtd       	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
messagebus     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
nvidia         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
portreserve    	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rpcbind        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rsyslog        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
smolt          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
udev-post      	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off

Is there some service that should be there and it isn't already?

Thanks.

[marko]

I had a slow machine at work today, the problem was that nfslock service was off when it should have been turned on. That would only be a factor if you use NFS.

[dd_wizard]

Do a top or htop in a terminal window, or check the processes tab in the System Monitor. It sounds like you have a process hogging the CPU. Firefox itself can hang on some sites at 100% CPU usage until you stop and reload the page.

dd_wizard

[shahdharmit]

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Marko, I have started nfslock. I had disabled it recently 'cause I read that it's needed only in networking environments. Mine is a standalone laptop so I thought it'd be ok if I turn it off. Let's see if turning it on makes some effect.

dd_wizard, here's the output of top 3 CPU consuming processes that I found using top

  1328 root      20   0 80120  40m  10m R 38.2  2.1  21:45.05 Xorg                                                                                            
 2336 dharmit   20   0 43140  16m  13m S 17.4  0.8   9:59.57 gnome-system-mo                                                                                 
 2667 dharmit   20   0  233m  66m  22m S  7.2  3.4   1:03.47 firefox

Firefox consumes 7.2% CPU. Are the other 2 processes consuming what they should consume, or is it more than what they should be using? I am not sure about it.

[dd_wizard]

Xorg is high, although it spikes when you do things with windows. When my system is idle, I get this for top:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                            
26013 gene      20   0 1146m 185m  35m R  7.1  9.3  13:13.58 firefox-bin                        
28533 gene      20   0  413m  17m  12m S  3.7  0.9   0:29.31 gnome-system-mo                    
 1652 gene       9 -11  401m  10m 8648 S  3.5  0.5   1:21.20 pulseaudio                         
 1365 root      20   0  143m  25m  13m S  2.5  1.3  12:32.40 Xorg                               
 1972 gene      20   0  437m  12m 9776 S  0.2  0.6   0:39.20 sensors-applet

My system doesn't get laggy until something grabs close to 100% of the cpu usage. You might check ~/.xsession-errors to see if something is broken with X.

dd_wizard

[shahdharmit]

No problems there. Just some messages that came up when I opened nautilus through CLI for root user. But now after starting nfslock, I am feeling the change. It's quite fast now. Can't understand how that could happen but it is going good till now...!!!