Laggy 10.04 (Was: Re: ssh logins on 10.04)

[Reinhold Rumberger]

Sorry, I kind of forgot about this due to being a little busy.

On Tuesday 07 September 2010, gene heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 07, 2010 11:31:50 am Reinhold Rumberger did 
opine:
> > On Tuesday 07 September 2010, gene heskett wrote:
> > > This 10.04 system TBT, is awful laggy, even from its own
> > > keyboard.
> > > 
> > >  I think the next item to install is htop & figure out whats
> > > 
> > > hogging the cpu. 6.06 never suffered from this.  Humm, htop
> > > shows nothing.  The lags is as if the multi-tasking context
> > > switch is 2 seconds or so.  And htop says nothing is hogging
> > > the system, but it is 12 megs into swap sitting overnight. 
> > > 6.06 was never into swap.
> > 
> > Apart from the obvious (getting a list of running processes and
> > looking for anything superfluous): is kdm running?
> 
> It shouldn't be the default is gnome with the LTS version.

Well, gdm then.

> > Also, you should note that since 10.04 uses upstart, you're
> > going to have to edit the files in /etc/init (no, not
> > /etc/init.d) by hand to stop the services from starting every
> > boot.
> 
> Wasn't aware of that, thanks.
> 
> > Just to make things more
> > fun, there are still quite a few apps that use the old Sys-V
> > init style.
> 
> Can we look and see something that will define which is which?

You can look at /etc/init, the filenames should be a big hint. Also, 
in /etc/init.d the files that aren't links to /lib/init/upstart-job 
are still controlled by the normal Sys-V init mechanism.

> > You might also want to check whether /tmp is on the disk or
> > using some RAM fs.
> 
> Fresh install, sb on /, looks like it is.  I did a swapoff -a,
> then a swapon -a, that that helped I believe.

Perhaps adjusting the swappiness value could help, but seeing as I 
don't know enough about this, I won't recommend anything specific.

  --Reinhold