busy isn't always good

[markslaw]

This one is a real poser. I've got a 3.6 ghz. 8 core CPU with 4 GB or RAM and STILLL the thing will sit there and stall and the hard disk will churn and refuse to let me do anything productive until, well until whatever gremlins have possessed my computer decide that I may. I run a daily virus scan (Comodo), so there's no reason to suspect a virus, so what else might be going on? Looking at System Monitor doesn't indicate that any processes are running that are consuming much over 5% - 7% of the processor's attention. I'm stumped. Anyone else have a similar issue? How did you resolve it?

[claydoh]

Look at your system monitor for swap usage, which can really churn things on your drive. Even with that much ram, for some reason it still wants to hit the swap too readily.

A quick fix can be to turn swap off, then turn it back on .

sudo swapoff -a

then, once it has finished

sudo swapon -a

I have older hardware, all with 4 gb ram or so, but the laptop has always wanted to hit the swap at the drop of a hat, and I can feel it, even with 4gb and an ssd. My PC that is slightly newer, but has an old, slow spinning drive does not have this problem.

This link may be useful to adjust the urge to use swap.

[markslaw]

Just wondering. If I stuffed a little more memory in the computer, how much of a difference do you think it would make?

[claydoh]

It might, but it is not necessarily that you are running out of ram (though linux tends to make as much as it can available for system use), your system can still for whatever reason want to use swap too soon - which is why I suggested the swappiness setting. This is an easy thing to test before making any permanent changes.

[SecretCode]

I tend to agree it's most likely swap usage. But you could check for I/O usage - if processor usage isn't high, it's likely to be I/O. Install iotop and watch it for a while (requires sudo).

[markslaw]

Thanks for the idea. I went out to a command prompt and turned swap off and it seems to have worked for now. How do I make it permanent? I mean, performance seems to have improved significantly since I did this, or was it maybe that the swap file was too big and I need to pare it back? thoughts?

[vinnywright]

Thanks for the idea. I went out to a command prompt and turned swap off and it seems to have worked for now. How do I make it permanent? I mean, performance seems to have improved significantly since I did this, or was it maybe that the swap file was too big and I need to pare it back? thoughts?

are you using a swap file ,,,or partition and what size is it ?

I would start with just turning down the swappiness ,,,as in the link @claydoh posted in post #2

VINNY

[markslaw]

thanks again. I did the edit to sysct1.conf as the article suggested and so far so good. I guess now I just let it run with this configuration and see whether any more tweaking is necessary, but for now, not bad, not bad at all. thanks again.