On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 20:21:38 -0800 Daniel Hedlund <dan...@digitree.org> dijo:
>On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 17:24, John Jason Jordan <joh...@comcast.net> >wrote: >> They all reported nothing, except "unhide sys" found a long list of >> hidden processes. "Aha!" I thought. So I checked them with top >> (maximum 20 at a time). All looked perfectly normal and only two or >> three were consuming any CPU% at all, and they were taking only >> 1-3%. The only oddity was that several had more than one instance of >> the process running, and one (console-kit-dae) had around 60 >> instances running. But none of them were taking any CPU or RAM. > > >I believe in an earlier email you suggested that you experimented a >little with powertop but did not specify whether you understood any of >its output; it might be time to revisit the program. > >Beyond a 'top'-like interface, powertop can show a summary of data >collected over a period of time with the '-d' option. You should be >able to get a list of processes that are waking up the CPU most often, >what percentage of the time the CPU is at each frequency and the >percentage the CPU is in a given state. While a program might not be >using 100% of the CPU, it might be interrupting the CPU often enough >to prevent it from sleeping. Try running powertop for a full 60 >seconds with the following command: >$ powertop -d -t 60 I ran the above command, and it gave me some information that would probably be useful if I fully understood what it is saying. However, I resolved the problem. I rebooted the computer and it is now acting as it always did before. The sad thing is that now I have no way to figure out what caused the problem. But having said that, I now have a major suspicion. I recall that I had used a USB drive a few times to move a file to my desktop. (Yes, they're networked, but telling them to accept each other is more work than just plugging a USB stick in and pulling it out.) After finishing with the USB stick Nautilus kept showing it in the Places menu, even though it was unmounted and physically removed. I tried several things to get rid of it, but even root was told he didn't have permission. I think there was something messed up with the USB port, especially as it is gone now that I have rebooted. <snip> >In the above example, the npviewer.bin (a wrapper around the flash >plugin) is a major offender; It's only consuming 2-3% of CPU but it's >responsible for 26% of wakeups. What's nice is that it also break out >which parts of the kernel are waking up the CPU which top/'gnome >system monitor' doesn't seem to do. If you're not sure what your >results mean, feel free to paste it back to the list. If powertop >really has nothing useful then, as others have started to question, it >might be hardware and/or fan control. It is true that Firefox is a hog, and flash even worse. Here is what I get when I run it now: Top causes for wakeups: 23.4% (129.9) [extra timer interrupt] 20.6% (114.1) [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick 19.5% (108.3) npviewer.bin 18.0% ( 99.9) firefox 5.2% ( 29.0) [eth0] <interrupt> 5.1% ( 28.1) ktorrent 2.8% ( 15.5) [ata_piix] <interrupt> Everything else was under 1%. I wonder what the "extra timer interrupt" is doing. The computer is running normally now, but if I can tweak something to improve performance, why not? _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
