Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

[Azurescens]

Hi everyone,

I've been using Kubuntu for about a month now and it's been great with the exception of a few issues. The biggest one at the moment is having to reboot frequently to keep the computer performing at a reasonable level. When it first boots its as smooth and responsive as it is under XP, if not more so, but it keeps getting slower until it becomes so annoying to use that I reboot. Applications take longer to launch, pop-up menus and the like take longer to appear, animations and things like scrolling a web page or just moving a window become really choppy.
I've been playing around with settings and stuff trying to figure out what it is and the only thing I've found that looks like it could be related is the Xorg process. If I check System Monitor right after booting it's using around 20 MB of memory and a negligible amount of CPU, usually showing nothing and occasionally 1 or 2 %. If I check again after a few days the process will be using 500-600 MB and constantly hovering around 20% CPU with occasional spikes as high as 70 or 80%. I've tried disabling desktop effects but this only slows down the rate at which the process consumes resources giving me 5 or 6 days between reboots instead of the usual 3.
Any ideas on what could be causing this and how to fix it would be much appreciated.

[Snowhog]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

First, Welcome to KFN. Second, your description of the problem, without having provided details about your system - hardware specs (Desktop or Laptop, and Manufacture/Model; CPU - 32-bit or 64-bit, and manufacture: AMD, Intel (Family: Pentium (I, II, III, ...) Dual-Core or ...), ...); Amount of installed RAM; Video Card/Chip Manufacture/Model), and what version of Kubuntu you are using, makes it difficult to provide any insight that might be helpful. So, if you please, enlighten us?

[Azurescens]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Bah. My apologies. I always forget to post specs when asking questions

It's a desktop, no manufacture/model, I built it myself and have been upgrading components here and there for years. Current specs as best as I can recall are:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2
GPU: Asus Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+
RAM: 2 GB
Motherboard: Asus (I forget the exact model)
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy (again, I forget the exact model)
Hard Drives:
1x Western Digital 250 GB SATA drive (Windows XP)
1x Maxtor 250 GB IDE drive (Kubuntu)
2x Samsung 1 TB drives on the MoBo's RAID (which Kubuntu sees as 2 distinct drives, but that's a question for later)

I'm running Kubuntu 9.10 64 bit and using the restricted nvidia drivers. I also have dual monitors that I set up with the nvidia configuration application. Is this enough info? I can dig up specific models, etc. if necessary.

[Snowhog]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Thank you. Yes, reasonably sure that this is sufficient info on your system. Keep an eye on this thread, as others will be posting with additional questions and/or suggestions.

[Telengard]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

2x Samsung 1 TB drives on the MoBo's RAID (which Kubuntu sees as 2 distinct drives, but that's a question for later)

Motherboard RAID probably won't work. If you do find a way to make it work, I for one would be interested to read about it.

Which applications are running while the system is slowing down? Have you tried using the top command?

Since you say xorg seems to be consuming resources I wonder which version of the nVidia binary driver you're running?

[verndog]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Bah. My apologies. I always forget to post specs when asking questions

It's a desktop, no manufacture/model, I built it myself and have been upgrading components here and there for years. Current specs as best as I can recall are:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2
GPU: Asus Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+
RAM: 2 GB
Motherboard: Asus (I forget the exact model)
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy (again, I forget the exact model)
Hard Drives:
1x Western Digital 250 GB SATA drive (Windows XP)
1x Maxtor 250 GB IDE drive (Kubuntu)
2x Samsung 1 TB drives on the MoBo's RAID (which Kubuntu sees as 2 distinct drives, but that's a question for later)

You can retrieve a lot of information and even your motherboard info with the following command. You might want to edit the output and keep it for future reference.

sudo dmidecode

[askrieger]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

This problem has been seen before.

The easiest solution (which sometimes works) is to:
(a) Rename your /home/<yourname>/.kde file so that a new .kde will be generated on reboot.
(b) Reboot your system.

Another possibility (especially on 64 bit CPUs) is the Adobe flash player. Try switching to Gnash (it's in the repos).

[GS2]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Don't forget renaming the .kde folder will remove any settings you have changed in kde from the default

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

First, try either the top command, or CTRL-ESC from inside kde, and see if you can determine from either which process is eating your cpu.

Another thing you might try, just as an experiment, is instead of rebooting try shutting down X and kde. To do this, log out, then from the login screen choose "Console login", login, and type

sudo service kdm stop

Now try some commands, and see if your system has recovered any performance. You might also use the top command, to see if anything is hogging your resources.
You can restart x and kde from the console with "sudo service kdm start".

The idea here is to figure out whether it's the video/kde stuff, or something else that is slowing it down.

[askrieger]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Don't forget renaming the .kde folder will remove any settings you have changed in kde from the default

Which is precisely the point of the exercise.

[Azurescens]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Thanks for the info, everyone!

I am using version 185 of the nVidia driver.

I've tried the top command but it looks like it just shows basically the same information as the System Monitor app. Is there an advantage to it over SM? Is there something extra it does that I'm missing or is it more accurate or something?

The applications I've been using most often are Opera, Firefox, Evolution, Pidgin and Akregator. Perhaps a few others but these 5 probably account for around 90% of what I've been using. Once the system has gotten slow it doesn't seem to matter what I run or avoid running, it stays slow until a reboot.

The flash idea is a good thought. I do watch a lot of web videos and I've noticed that when a flash video is playing a process called npviewer.bin takes up quite a bit of CPU but it seems to give it up once the video stops so I don't know if that would cause the long term slow down I'm seeing.

I will continue to work on it and try these suggestions. Thanks again for the help.

[GS2]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Don't forget renaming the .kde folder will remove any settings you have changed in kde from the default

Which is precisely the point of the exercise.

Sure - but if the OP was not aware of this - and had a heavily customised desktop (icons, colours etc) he/she would might then have to spend quite some time reseting all this - or were you going to ask him/her to put all the files back one by one until you find the one that might cause this issue .......?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Just another quick idea -- I have noticed that firefox has resumed its old behavior of not going away when shut down, but leaving a zombie process that has to be manually killed. Check and make sure that there is no firefox process running when it shouldn't be.

[Telengard]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

I don't know the history of the Firefox bug, but I have experienced it a few times. It seems to happen more often when some plugi-like Java or Flash in has frozen. Even when Firefox is functioning correctly it has been known for ever increasing resource consumption over time.

[Azurescens]

Re: Performance degrades over time; have to reboot every few days

Hello again, everyone!

Sorry to take so long to post a follow-up. I've been busy and haven't had much time to work on this issue.

I tried switching to version 173 of the nVidia driver (the only other option I had in the 'Hardware Drivers' app). That didn't fix the issue although it did seem to improve it somewhat by decreasing the rate at which the system slows down. I was able to run for a full week before it got annoyingly slow compared to just 2 or 3 days before. I thought it was interesting that with this version the Xorg process is using around 110 MB of memory when first booted where it was only 20 MB with the newer version.

I also tried doctordruidphd's suggestion of shutting down X and KDE instead of rebooting. The system performed fine once they were shut down. I couldn't find anything that was using a significant amount of CPU or RAM and after restarting them it ran as smoothly as it would after a reboot.

I just tried renaming my .kde folder. I guess now I'm going to let it run for a few days and see if I have any issues.