On 31/05/14 03:25 PM, David wrote:
On 1 June 2014 03:05, Gary Dale <garyd...@torfree.net> wrote:
On 31/05/14 12:43 PM, William Unruh wrote:
In linux.debian.user, you wrote:
I'm running Debian/Jessie on an AMD64 system using KDE. My system
periodically grinds to a halt for a minute or so then resumes as if
nothing had happened. This only happens when I'm running KDE. Gnome and
xfce work properly, even with the same applications open.
I recently installed Gkrellm (using default settings) to see what is
happening when my system grinds to a halt. The only unusual part I see
in it is that the procs box has the brown line climbing to the top of
the chart. Interestingly, the slope of the brown line continues
throughout the slowdown, which suggests that whatever it is measuring is
continuing to increase.
That is the number of processes that are running
The blue/green things there are how many forks there are within some
process.
Possibly not. Sorry, I'm actually using the "prev" theme, not the default
one (right-click on the header, select theme | prev). This shows the number
of procs as a number. The number remains fairly steady over time. Under xfce
(which I am currently using - this KDE problem is just too annoying), the
(proc) brown line floats around a bit while the blue chart shows lots of
spikes. Under KDE, the brown line goes well above the blue spikes. On the
disk chart, the brown and blue charts show spikes in xcfe but jump to a
solid high level under KDE during the slowdown - although I do have one
saved screenshot where the disk activity shows a high number but the brown
and blue charts are both at a low level.
My interest in reading and helping with the specifics of your problem
pretty much evaporated when you persist in using "brown" and "blue" as
identifiers, even after you realise that the colors change depending
on the particular theme you are using. I think you are more likely to
receive help if you make the effort to learn what all the gkrellm
plots represent and present your problem in those terms instead of
talking about the pretty colors. That will both improve your
understanding of what is happening, and make it easier for people to
help you.
If you right-click on the proc plot you can discover that one curve is
"load" and the other is "forks". The fact that one may or may not be
above the other is irrelevant because they both autoscale
independently.
Actually I don't discover that at all. That information is hidden away
in an info tab when I right-click on the Proc name bar, not in the plot
area. The name bar doesn't respond to left-clicks, just to right clicks,
while the chart area responds to left clicks by turning the procs and
users info on and off.
It takes a fair amount of interpretation to guess that the line is
reporting forks while the vertical bars are possibly procs (or
vice-versa) since the the line graph goes up and down while the number
of procs reported stays constant. Similarly the spikes in the vertical
bar chart don't seem to reflect the stable number of procs being reported.
It would be helpful, but would require a larger interface, to have
on-screen labels for the various graphs, such as a tool-tip style popup
telling you what the line or bar is measuring.
In the gkrellm configuration for the proc builtin, you can read the
info tab that explains more about that. Also in the setup of the proc
builtin I have entered this format string
\w1000\e$p\f procs\w1000\e$l\f load\n\e$u\f users\w1000\e$f\f forks
My proc setup was \w88\a$p\f procs\n\e$u\f users. When I try yours, it shows
two more numbers in the right side of the chart area. The top number goes
between 0.6 and 0.8 from time to time while the bottom number jumps around
between 1 and 6.
It gives more information, but nowhere near what running 'top' offers.
I guess that the gkrellm curve you care about is "load", so you
probably need to look at the "load average" numbers in top. Searching
for information on this will find useful links like these:
https://www.linux.com/component/content/article/174-tutorials/42048-uncover-the-meaning-of-tops-statistics
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001
Also 'iotop' can tell you what process is doing disk read/writes, this
might be helpful if you feel that the slowdown is correlated with some
process that is disk-intensive.
Once you have the process ID numbers, you can use a tool like 'pstree
-p' to better see what initiates the offending process.
I have no idea about KDE.
Unfortunately, neither top nor iotop identifies a process as doing
anything remotely strenuous. However, iotop does confirm that the total
i/o going on when the computer is rather a lot. This is what GKrellm
also shows in a nicer format. The processes that iotop shows as doing a
little disk activity are the same whether the computer is running slow
or running normally. It doesn't seem to show what is doing the large
amounts of disk I/O.
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