Announcement

**kgtboca** · May 16, 2010, 07:50 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

I wanted to mention that I am a java developer so mostly I notice that anything to do with java is much much slower and I see that the cpu utilization for java operations are much higher. I've also noticed that vmware is very slow but maybe that is because I use java inside the vm

? I've added the following to the java command line: -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false and have backleveled the version of java I'm using to jdk1.6.0_06 but nothing seems to make a difference.

Does anyone out there have any insight into this? Any ideas on work arounds? Or do I just have to wait for the next version of kde or next kernel? Any ideas at all

**oshunluvr** · May 16, 2010, 09:07 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Some people have had success with the 173 series driver.

I assume you're using an xorg.conf file?

Why don't you attach it to your next post and I'll have a look?

Also - go through your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and see if anything is amiss.

**kgtboca** · May 16, 2010, 09:37 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Thank you for your respoonse. I tried the 173 driver but it didn't seem to work at all. I looked at the log file and don't see anything unusual in there, but then again I'm not sure what I'm looking for. I've attached both the xorg.conf and the log file. Let me know if you see something.

Thanks

Attached Files

**kgtboca** · May 16, 2010, 10:45 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

I am attaching the xorg.conf file used for the dual head and the log file after the slow down occurs. Note that the system actually runs fine for a few minutes prior to slowing down. To quantify the slow down, it normally takes less than 5 seconds to build my application when things are working correctly, but after the slow down it takes around 1 minute.

Thanks to anyone out there who can help debug this.

Attached Files

**dibl** · May 16, 2010, 11:43 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Quadro FX 3700M is supported by the current Nvidia driver 195.36.24.

I think you're going to have do some experiments to narrow down your search for a cause of the problem. Your suspicion of KDE 4.4 could have merit. Are you using Desktop Effects? If so, try turning them off while you try different things.

Does the problem happen if you don't run your java application?

Same question with the browser -- ?

You can open a "top" window and use that to see if it is really xorg that is the only culprit, or are other things using a lot of resources at the same time?

If you used "nvidia-xconfig" to write your xorg.conf file, then the only thing you should need to do with it is the edits to add the second monitor. ( I think -- I only use one monitor, so I'm not experienced with dual head.)

Those are my thoughts. Something is clearly a problem, but you're going to have to break down the possibilities and try them one at a time, to find the culprit.

As a last resort ... Xfce is not a bad desktop environment, really. You could have that as an alternate login -- it will run on top of the same Linux system as KDE is.

EDIT: OK, the specs for a Dell M6400 that I found said it was a Quadro FX 3700M, but in your xorg.conf it says FX 2700M, so there's a point of confusion. What does

Code:

lspci -vv

say? Was that xorg.conf file generated by nvidia-xconfig?

Also, I don't see compositing enabled in your xorg.conf file. Did you not intend to use it? Or does that chip not support it? If the xorg.conf file was generated by nvidia-xconfig, then probably the chip won't support it.

EDIT #2: According to your Xorg.0.log, it really is a FX 2700M. So I looked that up here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/product...2700_m_us.html

It's referring to a 17" mobile workstation. Doesn't say it can run two screens effectively, in high resolution.

**kgtboca** · May 16, 2010, 03:14 PM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Hi, lspci says its an Quadro FX 2700M:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G94M [Quadro FX 2700M] (rev a1)
Subsystem: Dell Device 019b
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Latency: 0
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
Region 0: Memory at f5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
Region 1: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Region 3: Memory at f2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
Region 5: I/O ports at df00 [size=128]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at f6e00000 [disabled] [size=512K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: nvidia
Kernel modules: nvidia-current, nvidiafb, nouveau

The xorg.conf file was generated by nvidia-settings.

As for the experimentation, I have done quite a bit of experimentation but can do some more. I've watched the system using top before and after the slow down and the one thing that I have observed is that the everything seems to use much more cpu after the slowdown and everything is much slower. I'll attempt some more scenario's to see if I can better isolate the problem, but I read somewhere else where someone was having a similar problem and their problem appeared to be related to kde; thats where I got the hint to try a the xfce. As for it not being a bad environment, I suppose you are right but for some reason I couldn't get out on the net using it when I was at the office (eventhough the interface was up). Also, I've become quite spoiled by kde so I hate to give it up.

I'd like to try to downgrade kde to see if it that is the culprit. Can you or anyone else out there point me to a reference and/or provide instructions for doing this?

Thanks for your help; let me know if you have any more insight.

**kgtboca** · May 16, 2010, 03:19 PM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Oh, one other comment ... I had used dual monitors successfully with previous versions of kubuntu and with windows so I know the hardware is capable.

**kgtboca** · May 17, 2010, 06:04 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

After dong some more experimentation, I have found that the slow down also occurs while using the xfce window manager; I have reproduced this with both the kdm and the gdm display managers. Thus, the premise that the slow down is somehow related to kde appears to be without merit.

I've looked at the system after the slow down using the monitoring tool and see that there is no virtual memory being used. Thus far I have not seen the slow down until after bring up vmware. Before starting vmware the system is pretty much idle, but afterwards the top part of top looks like the following (except I've change the user to xxx for security reasons):
top - 07:54:01 up 35 min, 1 user, load average: 2.58, 2.44, 2.01
Tasks: 193 total, 1 running, 192 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 11.3%us, 21.1%sy, 5.7%ni, 59.0%id, 2.6%wa, 0.1%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8183164k total, 5678764k used, 2504400k free, 323408k buffers
Swap: 9534456k total, 0k used, 9534456k free, 2129524k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2316 xxx 20 0 1676m 1.3g 177m S 110 16.8 27:25.52 vmware-vmx
2456 xxx 20 0 484m 40m 29m S 31 0.5 5:12.39 ksysguard
2842 xxx20 0 19216 1344 940 R 11 0.0 0:00.19 top
1255 root 20 0 149m 57m 24m S 10 0.7 1:44.09 Xorg
2096 xxx 20 0 2725m 1.2g 10m S 5 15.7 6:24.90 java
1709 xxx 9 -11 330m 8304 6320 S 3 0.1 0:44.31 pulseaudio
941 mysql 20 0 246m 30m 7120 S 2 0.4 0:04.92 mysqld

**kgtboca** · May 17, 2010, 06:57 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

After doing some more investigation, I've found that the slow down survives reboots. So even after rebooting my system, building my application takes 50 seconds compared with 2 seconds when things are working normally.

As a result I compared the xorg.conf files before and after the slow down and the only difference appears to be that some (mostly) duplicate comments were inserted into the file:

# Removed Option "TwinView" "1"
# Removed Option "metamodes" "CRT: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP: nvidia-auto-select +1600+0"
# Removed Option "TwinView" "0"
# Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"

Note that nearly identical comments appear just above these newly inserted lines:
# Removed Option "TwinView" "1"
# Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP: nvidia-auto-select +1600+0, CRT: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
# Removed Option "TwinView" "0"
# Removed Option "metamodes" "DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"

The only difference here appears that the order for the two monitors are swapped on the second line.

Just to see if it made a difference, i copied over the old xorg.conf file to the /etc/X11 and rebooted bu t there was no difference - the system was still slow. Now that I have taken a closer look at the differences, this makes sense as the only difference in the files are some newly inserted comments in the new one.

Thus, there must be some other configuration file that is being updated, I'm guessing by vmware workstation that is causing the slow down.

Next, I'm going to run with out vmware and see if the system continues to perform well. If it does, at least I will no what is causing it. In the meantime, if anyone out there has an additional insight based on these new findings, I'd sure appreciate your input.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

**kgtboca** · May 17, 2010, 07:02 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

OK, so just after making my last update, I've observed the system to be slow again ... this is without starting vmware ... so that premise also appears to be invalid. In fact the only application I used was firefox to update this topic. I'm now going back to a single head so I can get something productive done but will check back here to see if any one has anything to contribute to this.

**oshunluvr** · May 17, 2010, 08:27 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Well to me it looks like your xorg.conf and logs are normal. I'm leaning toward xorg 1.7.6 and/or the kernel you're using because top shows everything eating more and more cpu time. Karmic used the previous verion of xorg and an older kernel.

I doubt it'll give different results, but try powertop and htop before and after and see what that tells you.

**kgtboca** · May 17, 2010, 09:09 AM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Thanks for the references to powertop and htop ... I've not used either of those before but both seem very useful. I can't really attempt the dual monitor again until this evening because I have spent way too much time on this and can't sacrifice any more work time at the moment.

I've never back leveled the kernel or xorg. Can you point me towards a reference that explains how to do that? Thanks again for your help.

**codelion** · Jun 10, 2010, 12:12 PM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

This is the closest match to the description of problem been getting worse for me in recent months. Dell Precision M6400, Nvidia card, sometimes hit by slowness, upgrades, slowness hits get worse, thinking it is VMware, but then it isn't, trying versions, but now I'm writing on single head (built-in LCD) so to get work done, this is putting my work at risk.

I have an Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M card (instead of your 2700M) but that's just the bigger sibling, quad core QX9300 CPU but that's just big too (you didn't say yours?), 12G RAM but that's just big too (yours?). So that's not that much different.

My kernel however is 2.6.32.12-115.fc12.x86_64 I'm running Fedora 12.

For the closed source Nvidia driver I have 195.36.24 with something like
kmod-nvidia-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.x86_64.x86_64 1:195.36.24-1.fc12
or
kmod-nvidia-2.6.32.12-115.fc12.x86_64.x86_64 1:195.36.24-1.fc12.2
and
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.x86_64 1:195.36.24-1.fc12

and Xorg 1.7.6

xorg-x11-server-Xorg.x86_64 1.7.6-4.fc12

Me thinks we have effectively not working machines curtesy of the Nvidia card / drivers for Linux on this model computer.

At least now we are more sure it isn't Ubuntu or Fedora's fault.

I'm ready to not care any more and just buy the ATI card, better than losing my job.

I never wanted a fancy card. Simplicity rules. They're just not selling this amount of RAM in a notebook with built-in Intel grpahics

**oshunluvr** · Jun 10, 2010, 01:49 PM

Re: NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Well the first thing I'd try in both your cases would be to regress the video driver to 180 or 173. Then if no results regress kernel back to the first Lucid version and see if that does it.

Maybe even moving all the way back to Karmic would be helpful.

To regress video drivers, install then from the repos and use Jockey ("Hardware Drivers" in kmenu).

For kernels, install them and update grub to activate them.

Announcement

NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

NVIDIA dual monitors kde slow

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment