Poor performance for Fedora 9

srini2174 · #1 29th June 2008, 03:30 PM

Hi,

I am regular fedora user since the days of Redhat 7. I had installed the latest version of fedora 9 (64 bit) KDE 4 version on my desktop. But I found its performance to be too poor. The CPU usage shows 100% even when just one or two applications is running. When ever I start the packagekit it hangs. My machine previously had a 32 bit Fedora 7 (which I had uninstalled to install version 9) and I did not have any issues with it. The installation is totally useless now. Can any one suggest me a way to improve its performance.

Regards,
Srinivasan.B

bee · #2 29th June 2008, 03:37 PM

Hello.
What is your CPU speed?
What software are you running?

srini2174 · #3 29th June 2008, 03:55 PM

Hi,
Please find my m/c specifications below

Intel Pentium D CPU 2.8 GHz
512 MB RAM
Swap space of around 1.2 GB

I am currently running Yumex only. But even without running yumex if I just open the package kit and try to review updates I just get the information "Getting Information" and nothing else happens even after 10-15 min.

Regards,
Srinivasan.B

bee · #4 29th June 2008, 04:07 PM

I don't even remember well, but i think to view all running processes you have to type:

Code:

ps auxf > ps.txt

in your console...
Run this command when your computer is going to freeze... so we can look at what software is eating your CPU resources... (i hope

)

marko · #5 29th June 2008, 04:30 PM

I would run top:

Quote:

top

Which shows a sorted list of current processes and averages their statistics
every 3 seconds

This is what mine looks like as an example:

Quote:

top - 11:25:44 up 2 days, 9:21, 4 users, load average: 0.09, 0.49, 0.71
Tasks: 143 total, 1 running, 142 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 2.0%us, 1.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 4.6%us, 2.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 92.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2075164k total, 1910960k used, 164204k free, 107016k buffers
Swap: 2048276k total, 4k used, 2048272k free, 1455876k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2626 root 20 0 112m 51m 6996 S 0.7 2.5 19:09.01 X
2662 mos 20 0 13052 1224 872 S 0.3 0.1 1:02.02 dbus-daemon
2808 mos 20 0 139m 38m 19m S 0.3 1.9 0:53.60 plasma
2827 mos 20 0 82984 21m 12m S 0.3 1.1 0:41.09 krunner
2870 mos 20 0 58468 16m 9000 S 0.3 0.8 6:49.03 gkrellm
17426 mos 20 0 2364 1052 812 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.09 top
1 root 20 0 1948 736 532 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.41 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.35 migration/0
4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.59 ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
6 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.31 migration/1
7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.29 ksoftirqd/1
8 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/1

If you're using KDE4 there's a system monitor that will do the same thing,
just go to the KDE Application Launcher at the lower left of the desktop and
go to Applications -> System -> System Monitor

By seeing what the cpu hog process is you can make a decision as
to what to do, either just kill it off if it's not important or maybe it just needs to be
updated to resolve a problem.
Also if you have yumex running, I'd just use that and not try updating
with the packagekit until maybe later. It could be that Packagekit is
the problem

srini2174 · #6 29th June 2008, 05:48 PM

Hi,

As soon as I login into fedora I am just able to open the terminal. But as soon as I get the automatic update icon my system hangs. I am unable to even type something into the terminal. I tried to login using command line by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 but even here I am unable to login and I get the message "Login timedout after 60 secs". I am using the kernel version 2.6.25.6-55 (64 bit).

I also notice that sometimes my system monitor in KDE4 shows 100% even though none of the processes occupy more than 7% (I am sure that the count is not more than 50-60% since I don't see many processes running)

I am sure that this happens only because of the PackageKit or the update mechanism. I was never able to get the Add/Remove software working in this version. Any help to get around this problem.

Regards,
Srinivasan.B

bee · #7 29th June 2008, 07:59 PM

Press: Alt+F2 and enter the command i wrote before there....

srini2174 · #8 30th June 2008, 05:48 PM

Hi,

Please see the attached files for the list of process given by the command ps auxf > abc1.txt

The two files are the snapshot of the processes got just after the login into the KDE session. Once I see the package update Icon in the desktop I am unable to do anything. Neither does Alt+F2 works not Ctrl+Alt+F2 or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. As you can see from this the packagekit consumes the maximum CPU time

Regards,
Srinivasan.B

bee · #9 30th June 2008, 06:15 PM

i've look at your files....but i think there are nothing of abnormal...

If you think it's the package updater, why don't you disable/remove it?
It starts with your GNOME/KDE session, right? so you can ctrl+alt+f1 and edit files on your disk without enter in kde, is it?
Just look where that package updater script is located (i don't know atm...) and rename that file to "something.BAK" ... in this way it'll not start and you may look at your system a bit more carefully to find out what there are of wrong with it....

thunderogg · #10 1st July 2008, 12:40 AM

Are you sure it's not KDE 4? It's a real beast, at least it was when I tested it.

marko · #11 1st July 2008, 03:22 AM

Srinivasan,

Package kit isn't a necessary package, yum and yumex can do the job of updating
just fine. But before removing it totally try killing the current instance and
then update package kit via yum:

You can go to the Applications folder -> System -> System Monitor and use System Monitor to
kill package kit(find it in the list and select select Kill process with the right mouse
button). That's not usually necessary but since you say it's interfering it
might be best to stop it

yum update PackageKit* *-packagekit

I suspect you're running the original package kit that F9 came with,
on my host PKit was updated three times already. In my case I
decided to uninstall it because I prefer to just update when I
want. But it might be good to try the latest version before
uninstalling it.

bee · #12 1st July 2008, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by marko

You can go to the Applications folder -> System -> System Monitor and use System Monitor to
kill package kit(find it in the list and select select Kill process with the right mouse
button).

As for what i've understand...he can't kill package kit..because (even if it sounds odd to me...) when package kit starts, his computer freeze...

marko · #13 1st July 2008, 11:59 PM

Well, no need to kill package kit then.... I usually like to properly stop
something like that so various files are closed but
just yum remove it:

yum remove PackageKit* *packagekit

and then use one of the other package management tools.

It probably also would be a good idea to logout of the desktop
and back in so the dead KDE4 package kit taskbar icons are
gone.

asun · #14 2nd July 2008, 02:46 AM

I think it's KDE4 itself. I enabled the eyecandy (desktop effects) from KDE's system settings and Xorg constantly runs at around 30% utilization with CPU running at full speed. My PC's specs are:
AMD X2 5000+ (2.6 Ghz)
2 GB RAM
ATI HD2400

Compared to Gnome in which Xorg barely runs at around 2% with the CPU running at 1 GHz (thanks to cpuspeed).

marko · #15 3rd July 2008, 12:15 AM

Srinivasan.

Please try what I asked for in post #5, run "top" instead of 'ps'

"ps" is pretty worthless for doing profiling of running processes
because it just shows one instant in time, top will average over
a 3 second period and also include the stats at the upper
part of the page that shows the totals.