Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 13:59 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: This is a Pentium M 1.4 GHz w/ 512MB memory. Top runs at 1 load average. (or look at signature) good numbers. (saw sig, wasn't obvious it was the same system) /dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 1164 MB in 2.00 seconds = 580.64 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 94 MB in 3.05 seconds = 30.83 MB/sec /dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 808 MB in 2.01 seconds = 402.85 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 114 MB in 3.14 seconds = 36.30 MB/sec free -m total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 503499 3 0 36 187 -/+ buffers/cache:275227 Swap: 517101415 That much swap usage concerns me. I've got one server with 256MB ram, and one with 1GB. Neither one really touches the swap. Your system uses 100MB of it though. Even if thats not your biggest problem, it can't really be helping your situation. Eagle ~ # free -m total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 217127 89 0 37 54 -/+ buffers/cache: 35181 Swap: 956 0956 Blue ~ # free -m total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 884737146 0241 166 -/+ buffers/cache:329554 Swap: 972 2970 I can't provide much details as I'm not sure where to begin with details. And that certainly adds to the challenge on all this. I hate to suggest rebooting as I mercilessly taunt windows users for doing that all the time, but with your large swapfile usage it feels like you might have processes with a memory leak. Reboot and try emerging one or two packages as soon as the machine comes back up. If that does bring performance back to normal, then it probably is related to all the swap being used. I do have programs that seem to keep using more memory as time passes. At various times, xmms, gaim, and firefox have gotten silly with their memory demands, though it was usually a plugin of some sort that was the real cause. Not sure what else to even suggest that you try if that doesn't turn out to fix it. If its still a mystery, perhaps a tool like http://oprofile.sourceforge.net which has an ebuild as well as already being available in most (all?) current kernels will reveal what percentage of time goes to each process. Also, strace is handy to have around as you can have it capture all calls made by a program or even an already-running process and it lets you see what (if anything) a program is doing even when its not sending anything to the screen. -- Scott Taylor - [EMAIL PROTECTED] BOFH Excuse #367: Webmasters kidnapped by evil cult. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 16:44, Scott Taylor wrote: On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 13:59 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: free -m total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 503499 3 0 36 187 -/+ buffers/cache:275227 Swap: 517101415 That much swap usage concerns me. I've got one server with 256MB ram, and one with 1GB. Neither one really touches the swap. Your system uses 100MB of it though. Even if thats not your biggest problem, it can't really be helping your situation. Well.. having evolution opened eats up like 175MB worth of space. And this is a Laptop, BTW. :-) I can't provide much details as I'm not sure where to begin with details. And that certainly adds to the challenge on all this. I hate to suggest rebooting as I mercilessly taunt windows users for doing that all the time, but with your large swapfile usage it feels like you might have processes with a memory leak. Since this is a laptop, I reboot it quite often :-) Reboot and try emerging one or two packages as soon as the machine comes back up. I'll try that and see how things go. If that does bring performance back to normal, then it probably is related to all the swap being used. I do have programs that seem to keep using more memory as time passes. At various times, xmms, gaim, and firefox have gotten silly with their memory demands, though it was usually a plugin of some sort that was the real cause. gdesklets is also one memory hog.(40MB) nautilus (40MB) xmms (25MB) SLAPD (35MB) APACHE(29MB, each I think ) SPAMD (25MB, each?) Not sure what else to even suggest that you try if that doesn't turn out to fix it. If its still a mystery, perhaps a tool like http://oprofile.sourceforge.net which has an ebuild as well as already being available in most (all?) current kernels will reveal what percentage of time goes to each process. oprofile eh.. You don't say. Okay.. Time to take a look at it in more detail Thanks for the help. I'll either figure it out or.. I'll live with it:-) -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 17:11:40 up 7:51, 7 users, load average: 0.48, 0.54, 0.40 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Tuesday 18 January 2005 02:44 am, Scott Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can't provide much details as I'm not sure where to begin with details. And that certainly adds to the challenge on all this. I hate to suggest rebooting as I mercilessly taunt windows users for doing that all the time, but with your large swapfile usage it feels like you might have processes with a memory leak. Reboot and try emerging one or two packages as soon as the machine comes back up. If that does bring performance back to normal, then it probably is related to all the swap being used. I do have programs that seem to keep using more memory as time passes. At various times, xmms, gaim, and firefox have gotten silly with their memory demands, though it was usually a plugin of some sort that was the real cause. If one of those is the problem, then rc boot; kill unneeded procs; rc default should clean things nicely. No need to screw up your uptime with a reboot. :) -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
gdesklets is also one memory hog.(40MB) nautilus (40MB) xmms (25MB) SLAPD (35MB) APACHE(29MB, each I think ) SPAMD (25MB, each?) You might want to go lightwieght during the emerges. Stop Apache for instance. Or, for a laptop, unless there is something really specific that apache provides, dump it and use monkeyd. If you really need apache, par it down to just two server instances. no need to tie up xtra resources if it's not necessary. And if you haven't, minimize xmms - that eye candy eats memory, as well as uses disk i/o. Same with nautilus. Not only are you swapping, the laptops i/o bandwidth is being eaten into by a lot of eye-candy - dma accesses from memory to gfx. File updates for processes idling around, mostly doing little if nothing. If your willing to give up a bit of desktop integration, you might try something like fluxbox with rox. You can get icons on the desktop with a fairly decent file manager with a lot less weight. Same thing with web browsers - dillo works well for most sites without having to pull out the heavyweight - firefox, or the battleship - mozilla. Bob -- - -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 03:50, Bob Sanders wrote: gdesklets is also one memory hog.(40MB) nautilus (40MB) xmms (25MB) SLAPD (35MB) APACHE(29MB, each I think ) SPAMD (25MB, each?) You might want to go lightwieght during the emerges. Stop Apache for instance. Or, for a laptop, unless there is something really specific that apache provides, dump it and use monkeyd. I'll have a look at this monkey when I get time to monkey with it :-) If you really need apache, par it down to just two server instances. no need to tie up xtra resources if it's not necessary. Yeah.. I just did that. And if you haven't, minimize xmms - that eye candy eats memory, as well as uses disk i/o. Same with nautilus. Not only are you swapping, the laptops i/o bandwidth is being eaten into by a lot of eye-candy - dma accesses from memory to gfx. File updates for processes idling around, mostly doing little if nothing. yeah.. A _lot_ of eye candy. I've got lots of applets running on gnome. Does minimising xmms really work? Nope.. VIRTUAL = 27MB,RES=7MB,SHR=5MB If your willing to give up a bit of desktop integration, you might try something like fluxbox with rox. hehe.. Been using gnome since day 1 and I like it. Except for the SLow HD accesses, it's OK(but since I tried out a desktop system 2.4G P4 W/512MB RAM,,, I know mine's slow) Fluxbox is being used for VNC sessions to access to my evolution mail over LAN Links. You can get icons on the desktop with a fairly decent file manager with a lot less weight. Same thing with web browsers - dillo works well for most sites without having to pull out the heavyweight - firefox, or the battleship - mozilla. it's not the heavy and light stuffs I'm talking about, it used to matter when I was using a P166 w 72MB ram on RH8. @ that time, I was concerned with lightweight. Right now, Pentium M 1.4Ghz w 512MB Ram, it shouldn't matter _as_much_. :-) I'm still figuring it out.. :-) -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 10:37:32 up 1:34, 7 users, load average: 0.41, 0.77, 0.95 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 10:43 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 03:50, Bob Sanders wrote: gdesklets is also one memory hog.(40MB) nautilus (40MB) xmms (25MB) SLAPD (35MB) APACHE(29MB, each I think ) SPAMD (25MB, each?) yeah.. A _lot_ of eye candy. I've got lots of applets running on gnome. Does minimising xmms really work? Nope.. VIRTUAL = 27MB,RES=7MB,SHR=5MB Not sure minimizing is the key with xmms as much as just not using visualization (or other) plugins. Any memory leaks I've had with xmms were usually lessened or eliminated by using as few of those as possible. Fun toys, sure. But if other things like emerges are hurting as a result, should be an easy call on what to lose. hehe.. Been using gnome since day 1 and I like it. Except for the SLow HD accesses, it's OK(but since I tried out a desktop system 2.4G P4 W/512MB RAM,,, I know mine's slow) My main laptop is a 1ghz with 256mb. Its been hanging in there quite well for all the abuse I give it. The spamd processes are all coming from evolution, and I haven't found (or, admittedly, really looked for) a way to get evolution to use the lightweight spamc talking to a long-running spamassassin daemon which would be a huge improvement for it in terms of wasted effort in starting a whole perl interpreter for each piece of email it processes. VNC is probably consuming a bit of resources for you too. If you are reading your mail from other linux boxes, they can ssh in and tunnel the x screen directly without making your laptop keep a whole framebuffer and x server alive just for your mail. In fact, I even went further in the other direction by having my evolution actually running on a spare desktop of mine, with imap and pop connections to all the various spots, and when I read email from my laptop, I'm just tunneling the screen (over wireless) and letting a desktop do the real work of handling the mail. I did that mainly to free up drive space on my laptop, but it is a nice way to unload some processing to a machine other than my laptop. I'm always running gnome too, and rarely go without music. Looks like a number of the things you're running can be pretty memory-intensive. Only running apache/vnc as-needed or moving them off to old machines that would otherwise be used as doorstops could free up enough resources to be a noticeable improvement. I stopped having the mysql server always be running on my laptop, but it only takes a few seconds to start it up for logging either wireless signals or my route and notes for photography trips. The amount of memory you've got should be pretty reasonable for a laptop, but if vnc and apache are business requirements for you, maybe you should shoot for 768mb or more. -- Scott Taylor - [EMAIL PROTECTED] guru, n.: A person in T-shirt and sandals who took an elevator ride with a senior vice-president and is ultimately responsible for the phone call you are about to receive from your boss. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 13:43, Scott Taylor wrote: On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 10:43 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: hehe.. Been using gnome since day 1 and I like it. Except for the SLow HD accesses, it's OK(but since I tried out a desktop system 2.4G P4 W/512MB RAM,,, I know mine's slow) My main laptop is a 1ghz with 256mb. Its been hanging in there quite well for all the abuse I give it. The spamd processes are all coming from evolution, and I haven't found (or, admittedly, really looked for) a way to get evolution to use the lightweight spamc talking to a long-running spamassassin daemon which would be a huge improvement for I run spamassassin via sendmail milters. It does spawn a few childs but at least its daemonised. Evo is 1.4. VNC is probably consuming a bit of resources for you too. VNC is only used when I'm not within reach of the laptop. (gone down to the lab for work etc.) I ssh into the laptop, run vncserver, and then tunnel it from there. If you are reading your mail from other linux boxes, they can ssh in and tunnel the x screen directly without making your laptop keep a whole framebuffer and x server alive just for your mail. All other boxes are Windows. :-( I'm always running gnome too, and rarely go without music. I'm sure there's a way to tunnel music off the doorstop as well. maybe you should shoot for 768mb or more. I now have 2x256MB, I asked around for 1 stick of 1GB. It costs like USD650 (directly from DELL) and USD400 (from other places) That's a Lot of money for a country where the average working (just started working) adult gets like USD600 per _month_. :-( -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 14:54:16 up 5:51, 8 users, load average: 0.91, 0.69, 0.49 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
What is happening? It can hang for like 10 minutes at that very line. ccache is enabled. In addition to that, emerge of splashustils will just hang at Make klib (or something, Can't rememeber. Hangg there for like 15 min before I get fed-up) -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 16:08:22 up 1:10, 6 users, load average: 1.07, 2.03, 1.66 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 16:09, Ow Mun Heng wrote: What is happening? It can hang for like 10 minutes at that very line. ccache is enabled. In addition to that, emerge of splashustils will just hang at Make klib (or something, Can't rememeber. Hangg there for like 15 min before I get fed-up) Actually you know what.. It's slow in nearly every area. Emerging binutils now, and its at checking for suffix of object files... for like 5 min already. -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 16:22:07 up 1:24, 6 users, load average: 0.83, 0.95, 1.31 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 16:22, Ow Mun Heng wrote: On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 16:09, Ow Mun Heng wrote: What is happening? It can hang for like 10 minutes at that very line. ccache is enabled. In addition to that, emerge of splashustils will just hang at Make klib (or something, Can't rememeber. Hangg there for like 15 min before I get fed-up) Actually you know what.. It's slow in nearly every area. Emerging binutils now, and its at checking for suffix of object files... for like 5 min already. Just look at these emerge times Sat Dec 4 13:51:41 2004 -- sys-apps/iproute2-2.6.9.20040831 merge time: 1 minute and 22 seconds. Mon Jan 17 14:45:41 2005 -- sys-apps/iproute2-2.6.9.20041019-r1 merge time: 3 minutes and 12 seconds. Thu Sep 30 03:36:00 2004 -- sys-apps/gawk-3.1.3-r1 merge time: 57 seconds. Mon Jan 17 16:02:00 2005 -- sys-apps/gawk-3.1.3-r2 merge time: 7 minutes and 32 seconds. -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 16:46:44 up 1:49, 7 users, load average: 0.68, 0.85, 0.91 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 16:47 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: What is happening? It can hang for like 10 minutes at that very line. ccache is enabled. Just look at these emerge times Thu Sep 30 03:36:00 2004 -- sys-apps/gawk-3.1.3-r1 merge time: 57 seconds. Mon Jan 17 16:02:00 2005 -- sys-apps/gawk-3.1.3-r2 merge time: 7 minutes and 32 seconds. You still haven't given any information that even hints at a possible cause. How much memory does your system have? If you have only 64MB but are running xorg+gnome+whatever at the same time as building, it'll be a lot slower than when there was nothing but a text console running. What is your load average? Run the program top in another terminal while compiling on the same box. If the load average is much above 2.0, then you've got something clogging up the system and it's likely to be right at the top of the list of processes there. If the wa item (10.3% in the example below) is very large, then you may have a bad/slow hard drive or just too many applications reading data off the disk. Look there also for swap usage, it should be nearly zero most of the time. Or perhaps your hard drive is not using dma (check with hdparm -d /dev/hda). Look through your entire dmesg output. Are there any warnings about some device not being recognized or a feature being disabled or read errors or anything like that? Cpu(s): 37.3% us, 4.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 48.0% id, 10.3% wa, 0.2% hi, 0.0% si Those are all total guesses though. Your questions have been missing any real useful details for troubleshooting. One other thing though, if you installed your system from a stage3 tarball or from the GRP disc, the very first compile time shown by splat (for the base system packages anyway) is how long it took to get compiled on gentoo's buildserver which is probably a much faster machine than what you are running. So, the compile time of the earliest version of packages would in that case not be valid for saying if your machine is slower than it had been before. -- Scott Taylor - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Happiness is good health and a bad memory. -- Ingrid Bergman -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerges are slow, stuck at checking build system type
On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 18:01, Scott Taylor wrote: On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 16:47 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: What is happening? It can hang for like 10 minutes at that very line. ccache is enabled. Just look at these emerge times Thu Sep 30 03:36:00 2004 -- sys-apps/gawk-3.1.3-r1 merge time: 57 seconds. Mon Jan 17 16:02:00 2005 -- sys-apps/gawk-3.1.3-r2 merge time: 7 minutes and 32 seconds. You still haven't given any information that even hints at a possible cause. How much memory does your system have? If you have only 64MB but are running xorg+gnome+whatever at the same time as building, This is a Pentium M 1.4 GHz w/ 512MB memory. Top runs at 1 load average. (or look at signature) it'll be a lot slower than when there was nothing but a text console running. What is your load average? Run the program top in another terminal while compiling on the same box. If the load average is much above 2.0, then you've got something clogging up the system and it's likely to be right at the top of the list of processes there. If the wa item (10.3% in the example below) is very large, then you may have a bad/slow hard drive /dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 1164 MB in 2.00 seconds = 580.64 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 94 MB in 3.05 seconds = 30.83 MB/sec or just too many applications reading data off the disk. Look there also for swap usage, free -m total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 503499 3 0 36 187 -/+ buffers/cache:275227 Swap: 517101415 it should be nearly zero most of the time. Or perhaps your hard drive is not using dma (check with hdparm -d /dev/hda). using_dma= 1 (on) Look through your entire dmesg output. Are there any warnings about some device not being recognized or a feature being disabled or read errors or anything like that? Nothing that is directly visible Cpu(s): 37.3% us, 4.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 48.0% id, 10.3% wa, 0.2% hi, 0.0% si Those are all total guesses though. Your questions have been missing any real useful details for troubleshooting. One other thing though, if you installed your system from a stage3 tarball or from the GRP disc, the very first compile time shown by splat (for the base system packages anyway) is how long it took to get compiled on gentoo's buildserver which is probably a much faster machine than what you are running. So, the compile time of the earliest version of packages would in that case not be valid for saying if your machine is slower than it had been before. This was a system brought up from stage 1 install. I can't provide much details as I'm not sure where to begin with details. genlop -t k3b * app-cdr/k3b Sat Oct 2 15:53:39 2004 -- app-cdr/k3b-0.11.12-r1 merge time: 26 minutes and 43 seconds. Fri Oct 22 01:07:43 2004 -- app-cdr/k3b-0.11.17 merge time: 27 minutes and 55 seconds. Tue Jan 18 10:54:26 2005 -- app-cdr/k3b-0.11.18 merge time: 53 minutes and 31 seconds. -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 13:55:24 up 4:35, 7 users, load average: 0.76, 0.75, 0.48 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
