Hello All,
I have sort of hybrid media server as my living room PC. It's a Dual
Xeon 2650L-V3 (24 cores total) with 32Gb of DDR4 ram. It functions as a
storage server for my 40Gb Infiniband SAN, and as a regular fileserver
providing both samba and nfs. It also runs three virtual machines using
kvm/qemu, a pfsense load balancer for the network, a pihole in a
seperate no-gui debian install and a simple webserver debian install. In
total these VM's have 6 cores and 12Gb of RAM assigned to them. It has a
Radeon R7 240 2Gb DDR5 video card attached to a 1080p TV. I haven't paid
any particular attention to optimizing NUMA nodes or the like, but the
only VM that really has any substantial load is the pfsense VM.
Previously it was running Ubuntu 20.10, but I've recently reinstalled it
with Debian 10 because Ubuntu development has been taking a development
direction that I'm finding increasingly annoying. The only thing that
has been problematic since the reinstall is that I'm noticing extreme
stuttering on the gnome desktop which wasn't present under Ubuntu, even
with a positively ancient 512Mb videocard.
I'm using the open source radeon drivers that you get using
contrib/non-free and I've scoured google trying to figure out the
problem. The only thing I can come up with is that Gnome 3.30 is
exceedingly slow, so I installed xfce4, but to a lesser extent this
still suffers the same problems. Another point that may be related is
that I have to log in a great many times before I can actually get into
the desktop. Gdm login screen typically simply comes back 3-5 times
before the desktop will display. I feel it's probably related, but this
too is something that I've not been able to find anything substantial
about through google searches.
I'm wondering if anyone has a suggestion for solving this, or perhaps
whether this is a known problem dat is likely to be naturally adressed
by the updates in Debian 11 which is releasing very soon? Does anyone
have any experience with this issue?
If anyone has any insights to share, I'd love to hear them.
EJ
