Kubuntu 11.04 is kinda slow

[graker]

Hello.

I recently moved from 10.10 to 11.04 (not by upgrade, just reinstalled it). And I noticed two sad things. First one is NVidia proprietary drivers installation which is not working for my GF 540M. But that one I'm still fighting with, using these forums.

Second one is worse. Some things in KDE seem to run awkwardly slow. For example, Krusader opens directories only after about 1 second thinking, and it is the same for both empty and not empty directories. At the same time, Dolphin works fine, opening everything very fast. Another example is the shutdown window. When I press my laptop shutdown button, it takes about 10-15 seconds to load it and the environment just freezes for that time (I can move the mouse but I can't switch desktops or open applications or such).

It's weird because 10.10 worked fine with Krusader and the shutdown button. And I don't even know where to look for an answer. Did anyone experienced something like this?

Thanks.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 is kinda slow

Open a Konsole and issue
sudo powertop

If it is not on your system then
sudo apt-get install powertop

It will give you an updated listing of all of the interrupts being done by your system.
See which ones are hogging the interrupts. Capture the output an post it here.

[graker]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 is kinda slow

Thanks. I did that, and when I'm refreshing it and manipulating Krusader at the same time, it looks like this:

Top causes for wakeups:
 17.2% ( 46.4)  [i915] <interrupt>
 14.7% ( 39.7)  npviewer.bin
  9.7% ( 26.1)  PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad interrupt
  9.1% ( 24.5)  kworker/0:1
  7.4% ( 20.1)  knotify4
  7.3% ( 19.6)  [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  6.9% ( 18.5)  kworker/0:0
  5.6% ( 15.0)  [acpi] <interrupt>
  4.4% ( 12.0)  kworker/u:4
  3.9% ( 10.5)  [ath9k] <interrupt>
  3.2% ( 8.7)  krusader
  1.9% ( 5.0)  Xorg
  1.8% ( 4.8)  [ahci] <interrupt>
  1.1% ( 3.0)  [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
  1.1% ( 2.9)  mysqld
  0.7% ( 2.0)  [Rescheduling interrupts] <kernel IPI>
  0.5% ( 1.5)  [Function call interrupts] <kernel IPI>
  0.5% ( 1.4)  kwin
  0.4% ( 1.0)  [kernel core] add_timer (tg3_timer)
  0.3% ( 0.9)  firefox-bin

But still, I don't know what it means

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 is kinda slow

Mine shows this:

Cn        Avg residency    P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)    ( 4.7%)    Turbo Mode   1.8%
polling      0.0ms ( 0.0%)     2.27 Ghz   0.1%
C1 mwait     0.0ms ( 0.0%)     1.60 Ghz   0.2%
C2 mwait     0.1ms ( 0.1%)     800 Mhz  97.9%
C3 mwait     2.3ms (95.1%)

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 427.1  interval: 10.0s                                
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 20.5W (2.0 hours)

Top causes for wakeups:
 32.7% (165.3)  [extra timer interrupt]
 21.3% (107.7)  plugin-containe
 10.7% ( 53.8)  [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  7.2% ( 36.2)  [ehci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb5] <interrupt>
  6.7% ( 33.6)  [iwlagn] <interrupt>
  5.9% ( 30.0)  firefox-bin
  4.9% ( 24.5)  USB device 2-6 : Sony VAIO USB Internal Optical Drive ()
  3.5% ( 17.7)  USB device 5-2 : USB Receiver (Logitech)
  0.0% ( 0.1)D flush-8:0
  1.6% ( 8.0)  [kernel core] usb_hcd_poll_rh_status (rh_timer_func)
  0.6% ( 3.2)  knotify4
  0.6% ( 2.8)  squid

Which includes the top half, which you left out. The listing tells us what percentage of time the CPU is in each of its performance modes. You can see that I spend 98% of my CPU time running at the lowest level, 800 MHz, 1/3rd of its highest speed. IF I wanted it to run faster I could go to the power management in System Settings and force the higher MHz level all the time, but I leave it on auto and when browsing the web all that speed isn't necessary since the CPU is constantly waiting on the IP bandwidth anyway.

The bottom half tells you how many Interrupt requests were made during the last 10 seconds. When ever an application or service requires the attention of the CPU it sends out an a request for the CPU to interrupt what it was doing and give time to the app or service. (Yes, most applications spend most of their time waiting, usually on the user, and very little of their time "calculating".) Excessively high IRQs usually indicate that the app or service is looping (running the same set of code over and over, waiting for something that may never happen), sometimes an indication of bad configuration or bad code. In my case I see nothing unusual when comparing the output of powertop run when only it and Konsole are running on the desktop.

Yours looks very clean and economical, but I suspect that your CPU is probably running at its lowest speed as well. For me it is not an issue because even thought my two cores run at 800 MHz when they could do 2.27GHz, the two cores handle the load I put on them very well. You are running about 290 IRQs in 5 seconds, or roughly 60 interrupts per second, which is not bad at all.

What is your CPU's clock speed, levels, and how much RAM are you running?

[dibl]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 is kinda slow

Top causes for wakeups:

 14.7% ( 39.7) npviewer.bin

That one is a flash viewer plugin. If you aren't presently running a flash video, then you (whoever actually owns the process) could issue a "killall" and kill the process. It seems to be sucking quite a bit of CPU time.