Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

[02walshe]

Hi,
After a another topic about the upgrade from Hardy Heron to Jaunty Jackalope, and the look, I've decided to post a different topic about the performance issues, and a few other 'niggles'.

As a list sorta person, here is a list (in no particular order)

• Notifications for Accessibility (Modifier Keys) are up to five seconds slower (as opposed to almost instant)
• Some broken apps (Kompozer mainly)
• Firefox keeps displaying big patchs of black on most webpages (but it is intermittent)
• No icon support from KDE 3 upgrades/imports
• No Sound from flash in webpages (youtube, etc)

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a moan about Jaunty, but there are clearly some issues that still need to be ironed out. An upgrade shouldn't make you consider installing a downgrade.

02walshe

[josefko]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Kompozer: I think you run version 0.7.10, you need version 0.8 from the address http://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer.

[Exonel]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

• No Sound from flash in webpages (youtube, etc)

To fix that problem simple go to the mixer and put the PCM volume up :P, thats what i did and solve my problem

[KeithZG]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

• No Sound from flash in webpages (youtube, etc)

To fix that problem simple go to the mixer and put the PCM volume up :P, thats what i did and solve my problem

Depends if it's the same problem or not, I had a friend for whom sound would work in absolutely everything except for Firefox; her problem was fixed by deleting the .asoundrc and .asoundconf config files in her home directory (at least I think that's what those two hidden files were called; basically both the .asound* files in $HOME), immediately after doing so she had audio again in Firefox for youtube and etc.

No real ideas about any of the other problems, although I had a similar problem to the big patches of black, for me it was actually everything though; that issue went away with me switching to UXA rendering and using the xorg-edgers PPA for my intel video drivers (ironically that was the only thing they really improved, heh, but it was such a random and annoying bug that it was worth it anyways).

[02walshe]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

• No Sound from flash in webpages (youtube, etc)

To fix that problem simple go to the mixer and put the PCM volume up :P, thats what i did and solve my problem

Depends if it's the same problem or not, I had a friend for whom sound would work in absolutely everything except for Firefox; her problem was fixed by deleting the .asoundrc and .asoundconf config files in her home directory (at least I think that's what those two hidden files were called; basically both the .asound* files in $HOME), immediately after doing so she had audio again in Firefox for youtube and etc.

I don't have .asound or .asoundrc or any related files in my home directory. On searching my whole hard drive (2TB, took a while!) I haven't got any .asound or .asoundrc files at all. Any ideas?

No real ideas about any of the other problems, although I had a similar problem to the big patches of black, for me it was actually everything though; that issue went away with me switching to UXA rendering and using the xorg-edgers PPA for my intel video drivers (ironically that was the only thing they really improved, heh, but it was such a random and annoying bug that it was worth it anyways).

Any ideas how I would do this? I'm using Nvidia and the closed source drivers, if it makes any difference...

[josefko]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

until you (or update) solve internal sound in Firefox you can try to install mediaplayerconnectivity plugin into Firefox and watch video in external programs like VLC

[KeithZG]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Eeep, I need to check my "replies" list more often, sorry for being late in replying although I don't have much in the way of answers, but maybe bumping this thread will catch the eye of someone who does

I don't have .asound or .asoundrc or any related files in my home directory. On searching my whole hard drive (2TB, took a while!) I haven't got any .asound or .asoundrc files at all. Any ideas?

Hmmmmm I really don't know then. The files would only be in your home directory, though. Just to be sure, try going into a terminal (making sure you're in your home directory) and going "ls -a | grep asound". For me on my main PC it looks like this:

keithzg@foundation:/media/Zeitraum/etc/down/os$ cd ~/
keithzg@foundation:~$ ls -a | grep asound
.asoundrc
.asoundrc.asoundconf

Any ideas how I would do this? I'm using Nvidia and the closed source drivers, if it makes any difference...

It makes a BIG difference in that I mainly did what I did to get around the crushing performance issues, heh (although apparently it didn't entirely do the trick since things still slow down suddenly to a complete halt in KDE4 on the laptop in question, but that appears to be KDE4's problem not the video card/drivers). However it might just be that the newer X.org fixed things, just in case you can follow the part of this thread that talks about following the xorg-edgers PPA.

But BE WARNED! Things might very well break, especially since you're using the closed-source drivers (which tend to lag behind on X.org's development). Thus you'd likely have to have the absolute latest NVIDIA drivers and even those might not work. However that does bring to mind the idea that you could try and just use the absolute most latest NVIDIA drivers for the sake of trying to fix the problem with that alone. Might even work! I'm running them right now on my projector computer (which is an OpenBox session on Jaunty that I mainly use for XBMC), and I've been keeping the NVIDIA drivers up to date the easy way with Michael Marley's PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~thefirstm/+archive/ppa

[GreyGeek]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Hi,
After a another topic about the upgrade from Hardy Heron to Jaunty Jackalope, and the look, I've decided to post a different topic about the performance issues, and a few other 'niggles'.

As a list sorta person, here is a list (in no particular order)

• Notifications for Accessibility (Modifier Keys) are up to five seconds slower (as opposed to almost instant)
• Some broken apps (Kompozer mainly)
• Firefox keeps displaying big patchs of black on most webpages (but it is intermittent)
• No icon support from KDE 3 upgrades/imports
• No Sound from flash in webpages (youtube, etc)

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a moan about Jaunty, but there are clearly some issues that still need to be ironed out. An upgrade shouldn't make you consider installing a downgrade.

02walshe

None of the problems you list occur on my installation of Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 4.2.3.
I don't IMPORT KDE3 apps, but I have installed a couple from the repository with no problems.
FireFox plays youtube and other flash without problems, and I can even download a copy of the video using a plugin.
Don't use Komposer.

Are you stepping outside of the repository to install applications?

[fidesratioque]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

I've had performance issues as well.

Even idling, Kubuntu eats up about 10-15% of my CPU, which is an AMD Athlon x2 4400. This is really a bit excessive.

I have 4 GB of RAM and an 8400 GS Nvidia graphics card, so my system is pretty capable.

Previously, when idling, I'd only be using 4-5% of my CPU. I'm even thinking of switching to another Linux distro briefly to see whether the performance issue improves any.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

I've had performance issues as well.

Even idling, Kubuntu eats up about 10-15% of my CPU, which is an AMD Athlon x2 4400. This is really a bit excessive.

I have 4 GB of RAM and an 8400 GS Nvidia graphics card, so my system is pretty capable.

Previously, when idling, I'd only be using 4-5% of my CPU. I'm even thinking of switching to another Linux distro briefly to see whether the performance issue improves any.

Install powertop and run it as root in a console. It will tell you what your big interrupt grabbers are. It will also give you advice on what to do to reduce the total number of interrupts per second.

For example, my Internet connection was slow, and so was the response to mouse movements, programs appearing after selecting them, etc... Powertop showed that icecast was making 25-30% or more of my interrupts. I don't recall installing it but I removed it and my response improved significantly. Becareful, though, or you could end up removing your video chip interrupts (about a forth of the total), or your USB interrupts (about a fifth of the total), or the echi and uhci interrupts. But, you decide how much automatic interactivity you want your system to have. I.E., do you want your CD or DVD to automatically mount when you stick it in, or do you want to mount it manually?

[fidesratioque]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Thanks, GreyGeek... appreciate the input.

I got powertop but it's not appearing anywhere under Applications. And when I search for it in the Kickoff launcher, no result.

So, remembering your advice on the CLI, I went into Konsole and typed in 'powertop' and it launched immediately. :P

This is the result. I've noticed that my mouse seems to be eating up a lot of the processor when moving it, and this seems to be confirmation of my analysis. Do you think a new mouse would maybe help?

I'd be grateful for any advice on making sense of this output:

Top causes for wakeups:
20.6% (243.2) <kernel IPI> : Rescheduling interrupts
14.2% (167.4) <interrupt> : PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad
11.6% (137.4) npviewer.bin : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
9.5% (112.8) amarok : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
8.5% (100.8) <interrupt> : eth0
8.3% ( 98.4) <interrupt> : ohci_hcd:usb2, HDA Intel
5.2% ( 61.0) <interrupt> : nvidia
5.2% ( 61.0) <interrupt> : ehci_hcd:usb1
3.9% ( 46.6) firefox : futex_wait (hrtimer_wakeup)
3.8% ( 44.6) kwin : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
3.1% ( 36.8) USB device 1-9 : 802.11 bg WLAN (Ralink)
1.4% ( 16.0) USB device 1-10 : USB2.0-CRW (Generic)
0.9% ( 11.2) <interrupt> : sata_nv
0.9% ( 10.8) usplash : scan_async (ehci_watchdog)
0.7% ( 7.8) plasma : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.3% ( 3.8) ksysguard : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
0.3% ( 3.4) <kernel core> : sk_reset_timer (tcp_delack_timer)
0.3% ( 3.0) knotify4 : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)

[GreyGeek]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

...
So, remembering your advice on the CLI, I went into Konsole and typed in 'powertop' and it launched immediately. :P

I hope you actually entered "sudo powertop"...


Mine looks like this:

Top causes for wakeups, for the top interrupts:
16.6% ( 31.9) <interrupt> : extra timer interrupt
12.4% ( 23.8) firefox : futex_wait (hrtimer_wakeup)
10.9% ( 21.0) USB device 2-6 : Sony VAIO USB Internal Optical Drive ()
10.0% ( 19.3) <kernel core> : hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
9.0% ( 17.3) <interrupt> : ehci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb5
8.4% ( 16.1) <kernel IPI> : Rescheduling interrupts
6.0% ( 11.5) postgres : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
5.9% ( 11.4) <kernel core> : scan_async (ehci_watchdog)
4.3% ( 8.2) <interrupt> : acpi

My total interrupts/sec averages around 125.

....
Do you think a new mouse would maybe help?
...
Top causes for wakeups:
20.6% (243.2) <kernel IPI> : Rescheduling interrupts
14.2% (167.4) <interrupt> : PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad
11.6% (137.4) npviewer.bin : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
9.5% (112.8) amarok : schedule_hrtimeout_range (hrtimer_wakeup)
8.5% (100.8) <interrupt> : eth0
8.3% ( 98.4) <interrupt> : ohci_hcd:usb2, HDA Intel
(snipping the small fry)

Not sure about a new mouse, but perhaps you can turn off the touchpad. I have a script which does that. It requires synclient be installed. THe script is stored in my home directory, marked executable, and referenced in the "Autostart" section of Systemsettngs:

#!/bin/bash
# toggle synaptic touchpad on/off

# get current state
SYNSTATE=$(synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff | awk '{ print $3 }')

# change to other state
if [ $SYNSTATE = 0 ]; then
synclient touchpadoff=1
elif [ $SYNSTATE = 1 ]; then
synclient touchpadoff=0
else
echo "Couldn't get touchpad status from synclient"
exit 1
fi
exit 0

The default state for the touchpad is on ("1") and it is turned off when the KDE4 desktop boots up.

Also you'll notice that although I am running FireFox 3, and it can show flash videos without running npviewer.bin. It is notorious for loading down the desktop. Uninstall it. Install the "flashplugin-nonfree" and the "flashplugin-install" from the repository.

Also, stop the service Amarok started, unless you are constantly listening to music, and run Amarok only when you ARE listening to music.

Then, redo powertop and see what it shows and what your total interrupts/sec is.

[fidesratioque]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Well, I removed the flashplayer-alternative and put libflashplayer.so into Firefox's plugin directory, but it still runs npviewer when it's playing Flash content... what did I do wrong?

P.S. I did all of the above in terminal and I did it manually, i.e. unpacked the tar.gz from Adobe's website, deleted flashplayer-alternative.so and copied the libflashplayer.so into the plugin directory.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Well, I removed the flashplayer-alternative and put libflashplayer.so into Firefox's plugin directory, but it still runs npviewer when it's playing Flash content... what did I do wrong?

P.S. I did all of the above in terminal and I did it manually, i.e. unpacked the tar.gz from Adobe's website, deleted flashplayer-alternative.so and copied the libflashplayer.so into the plugin directory.

Apparently I didn't make myself clear enough.

What you "did wrong" was to delete files that were added (hopefully) by your package manager.

What I wanted you to do was to use the package manager (Synaptic, KPackageKit, ??) to remove npviewer.bin, not delete it manually or with Dolphin. That's what I meant when I said "Uninstall it." Using the package manager also makes sure that config files and libraries associated with the application are also removed. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of orphan files. So, IF you haven't removed npviewer.bin then use the package manager to remove it.

IF you used the Adobe flash tar file to install it, there should be an uninstall script in the directory from which you installed it. (Usually "uninstall.sh"). Run it to uninstall the Adobe software. If there isn't you've junked up your installation and may have to resort to manually removing the files that Adobe added, IF you know where to find them. You would know IF you knew how to read specs the installer followed to install the files.

After you have removed the Adobe files that were in the tar file, including the libraries (*.so.*) then use the package manager to install the two files I mentioned in my previous msg:
Install the "flashplugin-nonfree" and the "flashplugin-install" from the repository.

We'll work on the touchpad after you clean up your system, remove npview and Adobe, and add the two files I listed above.

[fidesratioque]

Re: Jaunty Jackalope Performance Issues (and other niggles)

Well, I regret causing all this trouble...

1) When I search for npviewer.bin in KPackageKit, nothing appears. This also applies to Adept.

2) I searched for flashplugin and flashplugin-installer was listed by Adept/KPackageKit. I removed that.

3) In the Adobe Flash tar directory, there is an install script but no uninstall script. So I must not have installed it successfully.

4) Right now, I'm trying to sift through everything to find all instances of libflashplayer.so so I can remove them, before I install the flashplugin-installer.

I still haven't been able to locate flashplugin-nonfree in any of the repositories. Could this be due to me lacking sources?

Oh, also, I do not have a touchpad (I'm on a desktop). I'm not sure why it thinks it's detecting one.