Negative caching

Fri Jun 19 08:03:02 UTC 2009

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Hal Burgiss wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:20:00AM -0600, Karl F. Larsen wrote:
>> 	Slow can be a shortage of RAM. And I think you have lots but it might
>> not all may be working. Use a Terminal with top to measure your RAM and
>> swap usage. Let us know what it shows when you you slow down.
> 
> I guess you missed the original post:
> 
> atop data:
> 
> PRC | sys   0.76s | user   1.70s | #proc    200 | #zombie    2 | #exit      ?
> CPU | sys      7% | user     17% | irq       1% | idle      0% | wait     75%
> CPL | avg1   2.90 | avg5    2.54 | avg15   2.23 | csw     9527 | intr    5228
> MEM | tot  992.4M | free   91.3M | cache 316.9M | buff    3.2M | slab   44.1M
> SWP | tot    2.9G | free    1.4G |              | vmcom   3.2G | vmlim   3.3G
> PAG | scan  10364 | stall      0 |              | swin    4293 | swout    585 (red)
> DSK |         sda | busy    100% | read    1625 | write    608 | avio    4 ms (red)
> 
> That was after a long idle period when everything was really slow, response to
> mouse clicks, keyboard events, etc. Click on a background window, wait 5-6
> seconds for it to start to come to the foreground. That kind of thing (and no
> compiz!).
> 
> As you can see, there is plenty of free swap space. You can also see the
> PAGING and DISK utilization stats are off the charts. There was no user
> initiated disk intensive activity at the time. None. No downloads going on, no
> copying, no unpacking, rsyncing, etc. The disk usage you see there was in
> response to simple mouse clicks (like to raise a window) and/or keyboard
> like typing in a text terminal.
> 
> If its not kernel swap, its something horribly askew in 9.04 (at least on my
> system). The same system has run 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04 just fine. 8.10 was a
> trainwreck (because intel chipset debacle). 9.04 is better, but it is a system
> that requires rebooting occasionally to be functional (at least the desktop).
> This is like one step forward, and 3 steps backwards. The notion of rebooting
> to maintain system integrity just rubs me the wrong way. This is a microsoft
> legacy.
> 
> To compare, current atop:
> 
> PRC | sys   0.66s | user   1.68s | #proc    180 | #zombie    0 | #exit      ? |
> CPU | sys      7% | user     17% | irq       0% | idle     76% | wait      1% |
> CPL | avg1   0.90 | avg5    0.45 | avg15   0.43 | csw    11319 | intr    2174 |
> MEM | tot  992.4M | free   23.4M | cache 363.7M | buff    2.0M | slab   44.3M |
> SWP | tot    2.9G | free    2.1G |              | vmcom   2.9G | vmlim   3.3G |
> PAG | scan      0 | stall      0 |              | swin      11 | swout      0 |
> DSK |         sda | busy      1% | read      12 | write      4 | avio    5 ms |
> 
> halb at honey:~$ uptime
>  08:45:56 up 1 day, 14:29,  2 users,  load average: 0.70, 0.45, 0.42
> 
> Life is good. For now. 
> 
	Hi Hal, I have trouble reading your "top" because I use large fonts on
my Thunderbird email client. I am just not able to see which item is
using a giant amount of RAM. This will tell you what is wrong.

	For an email I think you need to attach your top data so we can read it
with Gedit. Let me attach a top and we can see if it works. It is a
pain! I had to transfer the top to Gedit and then I will try to put it here:

top - 01:59:52 up 1 day, 15:08,  2 users,  load average: 0.90, 0.42, 0.20
Tasks: 124 total,   3 running, 121 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.0%us,  3.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 83.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.3%si,
0.0%st
Mem:   1034328k total,   940932k used,    93396k free,   138604k buffers
Swap:  1959920k total,      144k used,  1959776k free,   372292k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

 6682 karl      20   0  223m  99m  25m R  4.7  9.9 123:27.65 firefox

 6045 root      20   0 93508  44m 9068 S  3.7  4.4  27:36.42 Xorg

 6318 karl      20   0 40136  23m  13m S  1.7  2.3   5:29.43 gnome-panel

 6499 karl      20   0 20880  11m 7044 S  1.3  1.2   0:34.33
gtk-window-deco
 8502 karl      20   0 74988  20m  11m R  0.7  2.0   0:01.16
gnome-terminal
 8557 karl      20   0  2308 1120  852 R  0.7  0.1   0:00.10 top

 8573 karl      20   0 31112  16m  10m S  0.7  1.7   0:00.52 gedit

 6387 karl      20   0 62944  31m 9532 S  0.3  3.1   6:46.49 compiz.real

Well this looks good to me now. How is it to you Hal?

73 Karl

- --

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
        Key ID = 3951B48D

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