On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 11:22:50PM +0100, Marko Randjelovic wrote:
> Douglas Tutty wrote:
> >I run amd64 Etch on an AMD Athlon 3800+, one GB stick DDR2-800 ECC
> >memory (I know, to really get the dual data rate I need two sticks,
> >that's next year's upgrade). Since I use SATA drives I couldn't use
> >Sarge so don't know if Etch is slower on this box. My other box runs
> >Sarge but its a 486. I would hazzard a guess that my amd64 is faster
> >than my 486 :-)
> >
> >My top shows Mem: 1027728k total and under normal load including
> >watching a DVD is 97% idle, under 1% waiting.
> Do you run i386 or amd64 version of Debian?
> > I __finally__ figured out
> >how to get it to use swap and spend some time waiting:
> >
> > have aptitude upgrading (actual installation not downloading)
> > run long S.M.A.R.T. self-tests on sda and sdb
> > (dual SATA drives in raid1)
> > run a full backup (making tar.bz2 files)
> > run galeon
> > watch a dvd on VLC, deinterlace-blend, expand to full-screen
> > (1600 x 1200)
> >
> >
> >Then I use all of 84k swap, wait 25%, idle 94%. Swap is encrypted.
> Don't bother yourself. Just use Java. ;)
>
> top - 23:18:30 up 13:42, 5 users, load average: 0.28, 0.84, 1.09
> Tasks: 97 total, 3 running, 94 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 0.8%us, 0.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem: 704704k total, 697872k used, 6832k free, 6244k buffers
> Swap: 2104472k total, 84860k used, 2019612k free, 143872k cached
>
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 12761 bora 15 0 999m 277m 51m S 0.0 40.3 0:58.36 java
> 12572 tomcat5 25 0 429m 153m 45m S 0.0 22.2 0:20.35 java
> 10741 bora 15 0 265m 67m 18m S 0.0 9.8 0:42.74 icedove-bin
> 12807 bora 15 0 195m 43m 19m S 0.0 6.3 0:05.39 firefox-bin
> 7973 bora 15 0 125m 24m 12m S 0.0 3.6 0:11.37 gnome-panel
> 11166 bora 16 0 124m 23m 12m R 0.0 3.4 0:09.19 gnome-terminal
> 7884 root 15 0 192m 20m 6944 R 0.4 3.0 11:09.05 Xorg
> 7987 bora 15 0 107m 14m 10m S 0.0 2.2 0:12.44 wnck-applet
> 7975 bora 15 0 176m 14m 10m S 0.0 2.1 0:02.38 nautilus
> 8010 bora 15 0 132m 12m 9876 S 0.0 1.8 0:01.08 clock-applet
> 8007 bora 15 0 116m 12m 9928 S 0.0 1.8 0:01.04 mixer_applet2
> 8005 bora 15 0 115m 11m 8676 S 0.0 1.7 0:01.75 gnome-keyboard-
> 7961 bora 15 0 62968 10m 8548 S 0.4 1.5 0:13.97 metacity
The only thing I touch java for is javascript in the browser so I can
use bloatpages when necessary. Why else support-by-using such a
nasty, bloated, waste of processing? Then again, I only program in two
languages: python for the front end and, if necessary for speed, fortran
for the back end. Since I'm used to a 486 (and started out with a Z-80)
I try to reduce load subconsciously.
Why do you use a terminal that takes 23m, a file manager that takes 14m,
what is a 115m keyboard? No wonder your system is slow.
Keep in mind that with all these programms using virtual memory, their
memory requests are going to interact. There's a neat article in Linux
Magazine July 2006, p 40, "A Nodal Philosophy", section "What's running
on Your Nodes?", based on an interesting thread on the beowolf mailing
list. The summary is:
Substantial performance loss occurs when an application
resonates with system noise. High frequency, fine grained noise
effects only fine-grained applications; low frequency,
course-grained noise affects only course-grained applications.
Perhaps something like this is happening with all your concurrent
processes using swap. Its not like everything fits in memory except for
your one big program.
You really need to find out why you aren't showing all your memory and
if you want to run all these aps concurrently with good performance you
should add more memory.
Doug.
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