On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote: Just curious, I dont see your comments on what *top* tells you? you did try running top ?

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote: Interesting! So the audio chip is the culprit or just the most recent candidate?

Hello everyone, On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 01:00:34PM +0200, Suvayu Ali wrote: To answer myself; after I upgraded to kernel 3.4.6-2.fc17.x86_64 yesterday, I haven't seen any issues with load. My average load when browsing, reading email, or other regular desktop activities is ~ 0.22. Cheers, -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: A co-worker has a similar problem with a new Lenovo ThinkPad -- it turns out something about the audio chip was taking a lot more cpu cycles than it should be -- I'll try to dig out some more details from him. -- Jared Smith

Hi Paweł and Heinz, On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 03:55:45PM +0200, Paweł Brodacki wrote: Thanks for the nice explanation. But sadly this doesn't help either. Earlier the load average on login would be ~ 1-1.5. With these changes, it starts at ~ 2 and after about 5 minutes settles to ~ 1-1.2. For example now my laptop has been running for 50 minutes and load is hovering over 1. :( -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

Hi Heinz, Sorry for the late response. On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 7:31 PM, Heinz Diehl <htd(a)fritha.org&gt; wrote: I tend not to try things that I don't understand. Could please outline briefly what the above suggestions do? I would like to understand before I try them out. Thanks, -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 07/12/2012 03:29 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote: Hi Suvayu, It's possible that you have processes spending brief periods in D-state - short enough that they are hard to spot in top with the default sample period but long enough to count toward the load average (it's possible there's some other explanation though but that's what I'd try to rule out first). You could use tools like blktrace, iotop and latencytop to try to investigate further or if you're willing to install systemtap you could use the "sleepingBeauties.stp" script to look for processes spending >10ms in this state (and dump their stacks when they do). Regards, Bryn.

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 03:12:00PM +0100, Andrew Haley wrote: I looked through the entire process list all but 3 were "sleeping", 2 were stopped (I did that in a terminal, a less instance and an emacsclient instance) and one was zombie (again I know this one, it's the src-hilite attached to the stopped less instance). -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 08:36:31AM -0500, Steven Stern wrote: No nothing like that. On login, I start two processes `conky -D' and `emacs --daemon'. Apart from this I only have a few terminals, Firefox and a few emacs frames open. The Xfce session amanger starts pidgin and dropbox. That's about all the processes. I also use OfflineIMAP to sync my email, but that is setup to run every 5 minutes, and it has been setup as a cron job for ages; I never had problems with it before. Right now, my network usage is less than a KiB/s, both upload and download, and my lod average is 0.98! -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

On 07/12/2012 06:00 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote: rottled down and are at about 1%. Are you listening to music? Doing background uploads or downloads? -- -- Steve

Hi Bryn, On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 03:34:56PM +0100, Bryn M. Reeves wrote: With latencytop I see that the large latency processes are usually caused by 1. `fsync() on a file': Firefox, Google Chrome, pidgin, emacs 2. `Waiting for buffer IO to complete': jbd2/dm-* 3. `SCSI disk ioctl': hddtemp The wait times are of the order of 60ms - 200ms. `btrace /dev/sda' gives me the following: CPU0 (8,0): Reads Queued: 1,572, 22,536KiB Writes Queued: 5,211, 32,112KiB Read Dispatches: 1,612, 22,896KiB Write Dispatches: 3,956, 39,424KiB Reads Requeued: 2 Writes Requeued: 11 Reads Completed: 2,156, 27,844KiB Writes Completed: 7,028, 69,784KiB Read Merges: 0, 0KiB Write Merges: 1,568, 6,280KiB Read depth: 98 Write depth: 33 PC Reads Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Writes Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Read Disp.: 136, 0KiB PC Write Disp.: 0, 0KiB PC Reads Req.: 22 PC Writes Req.: 0 PC Reads Compl.: 90 PC Writes Compl.: 0 IO unplugs: 1,224 Timer unplugs: 35 CPU1 (8,0): Reads Queued: 107, 1,272KiB Writes Queued: 1,162, 6,768KiB Read Dispatches: 95, 1,140KiB Write Dispatches: 244, 4,708KiB Reads Requeued: 0 Writes Requeued: 2 Reads Completed: 0, 0KiB Writes Completed: 0, 0KiB Read Merges: 0, 0KiB Write Merges: 612, 2,448KiB Read depth: 98 Write depth: 33 PC Reads Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Writes Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Read Disp.: 28, 0KiB PC Write Disp.: 0, 0KiB PC Reads Req.: 0 PC Writes Req.: 0 PC Reads Compl.: 0 PC Writes Compl.: 0 IO unplugs: 264 Timer unplugs: 0 CPU2 (8,0): Reads Queued: 249, 2,284KiB Writes Queued: 4,206, 26,020KiB Read Dispatches: 238, 2,220KiB Write Dispatches: 1,463, 22,116KiB Reads Requeued: 0 Writes Requeued: 1 Reads Completed: 0, 0KiB Writes Completed: 0, 0KiB Read Merges: 0, 0KiB Write Merges: 2,214, 8,952KiB Read depth: 98 Write depth: 33 PC Reads Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Writes Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Read Disp.: 21, 0KiB PC Write Disp.: 0, 0KiB PC Reads Req.: 0 PC Writes Req.: 0 PC Reads Compl.: 0 PC Writes Compl.: 0 IO unplugs: 736 Timer unplugs: 9 CPU3 (8,0): Reads Queued: 247, 1,752KiB Writes Queued: 448, 4,884KiB Read Dispatches: 214, 1,588KiB Write Dispatches: 210, 3,536KiB Reads Requeued: 1 Writes Requeued: 0 Reads Completed: 0, 0KiB Writes Completed: 0, 0KiB Read Merges: 18, 72KiB Write Merges: 184, 736KiB Read depth: 98 Write depth: 33 PC Reads Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Writes Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Read Disp.: 23, 0KiB PC Write Disp.: 0, 0KiB PC Reads Req.: 0 PC Writes Req.: 0 PC Reads Compl.: 0 PC Writes Compl.: 0 IO unplugs: 171 Timer unplugs: 1 Total (8,0): Reads Queued: 2,175, 27,844KiB Writes Queued: 11,027, 69,784KiB Read Dispatches: 2,159, 27,844KiB Write Dispatches: 5,873, 69,784KiB Reads Requeued: 3 Writes Requeued: 14 Reads Completed: 2,156, 27,844KiB Writes Completed: 7,028, 69,784KiB Read Merges: 18, 72KiB Write Merges: 4,578, 18,416KiB PC Reads Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Writes Queued: 0, 0KiB PC Read Disp.: 208, 0KiB PC Write Disp.: 0, 0KiB PC Reads Req.: 22 PC Writes Req.: 0 PC Reads Compl.: 90 PC Writes Compl.: 0 IO unplugs: 2,395 Timer unplugs: 45 Throughput (R/W): 6KiB/s / 16KiB/s Events (8,0): 147,334 entries Skips: 0 forward (0 - 0.0%) iotop doesn't show anything in particular other than once or twice one of the desktop apps like Firefox showing up and going away almost immediately. I don't quiet know how to interpret any of the above output though. PS: I will run the systemtap script later tonight. -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.