VERY slow apps. loading
 

Hi,

It is taking an age (5-6 mins) to fully
populate my KDE desktop (basic, as
installed)
and about 40-50 secs to start a small K
application.

I have cross-over-office to run M$ XL &
Word from, these load and run instantly.

Being new to Linux I am at a loss to what my problem is
caused by.

I'm using:
Suse 8.1
Athlon 1800
1 Gig memory
HD patitioned as
--20 G Win 98
--20 G Win2K
--20 G Linux Ext3
Adaptec SCSI card
SCSI DVD player
SCSI Zip
IDE DVD R/W
FireWire port
USB ports
BIOS is set for plug&play (have tried otherwise to no avail)


I ran strace on some of the K programs and it records to
file as if all is well. This is from KPoker

:/opt/kde3/bin # strace -c -i kpoker
<Start>
upeek: ptrace(PTRACE_PEEKUSER, 1485,48,0): No such process
[????????] execve("/opt/kde3/bin/kpoker", ["kpoker"], [/* 59 vars */]) = 0
% time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
26.06 0.047949 475 101 select
17.76 0.032671 28 1180 9 read
16.68 0.030698 313 98 writev
14.54 0.026753 133 201 write
6.75 0.012417 65 192 close
6.21 0.011430 33 345 162 access
3.28 0.006032 26 233 50 open
2.42 0.004460 11 411 ioctl
1.10 0.002022 9 236 mmap2
1.00 0.001847 14 134 munmap
0.81 0.001490 7 216 gettimeofday
0.63 0.001154 6 202 20 stat64
0.43 0.000793 6 134 11 lstat64
0.41 0.000760 152 5 connect
0.34 0.000625 4 149 brk
0.30 0.000549 2 288 fstat64
0.22 0.000411 41 10 rt_sigaction
0.20 0.000363 15 24 readv
0.17 0.000307 6 53 mprotect
0.14 0.000253 2 118 _llseek
0.12 0.000225 23 10 getdents64
0.08 0.000154 31 5 shmat
0.07 0.000121 24 5 socket
0.06 0.000110 4 26 fcntl64
0.04 0.000073 37 2 1 rename
0.04 0.000067 17 4 shmdt
0.04 0.000065 33 2 shutdown
0.03 0.000054 3 21 uname
0.02 0.000044 22 2 pipe
0.01 0.000016 16 1 chmod
0.01 0.000011 2 6 getpid
0.01 0.000010 1 7 getuid32
0.00 0.000008 8 1 getcwd
0.00 0.000008 8 1 chown32
0.00 0.000006 6 1 1 unlink
0.00 0.000006 6 1 _sysctl
0.00 0.000006 1 5 geteuid32
0.00 0.000006 6 1 getsockopt
0.00 0.000005 2 3 time
0.00 0.000005 5 1 fchmod
0.00 0.000005 2 3 rt_sigprocmask
0.00 0.000004 4 1 shmctl
0.00 0.000002 1 2 umask
0.00 0.000002 2 1 setrlimit
0.00 0.000002 2 1 getrlimit
0.00 0.000002 1 2 getgid32
0.00 0.000001 1 1 getegid32
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
100.00 0.184002 4446 254 total
<End>

..however the process to get the poker window on the screen
takes about 25 secs!..stalling at the same point every time
with 'strace' displaying the results on screen.

I have tried several 'installs' trying to disable various bits of the hardware
without any success.

Unable to track down what is actually happening when the program goes for a
snooze (can't get KDE system Guard to tell me either), I'm hoping that someone
can point me in the correct direction.

Thanks,
peteheff

maybe something is hogging all the cpu? see if "top" gives you any insights.

acid_kewpie,
..tried 'top' while trying to load one of the K apps but there was nothing that 'jumped out' at me (but kdeinit uses a lot of memory)

Something that may be an eureka to you guys is a 'modprobe' error that I get; to the effect that it does not locate char-major 226?

For what it's worth here is a copy of the 'top' about 10 secs into loading, and as I said not much was moving.

<Start>
12:21am up 14 min, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.03
60 processes: 57 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
12:29am up 23 min, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
62 processes: 59 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 3.1% user, 0.7% system, 0.0% nice, 96.0% idle
Mem: 1032240K av, 195172K used, 837068K free, 0K shrd, 17024K buff
Swap: 2097136K av, 0K used, 2097136K free 76300K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
1307 root 15 0 39244 14M 11876 R 1.7 1.4 0:01 kdeinit
1096 root 15 0 59964 17M 3356 S 1.5 1.7 0:04 X
1191 root 15 0 37460 12M 10584 S 0.1 1.2 0:00 kdeinit
1194 root 15 0 38692 13M 11748 S 0.1 1.3 0:00 kdeinit
1317 root 15 0 920 920 720 R 0.1 0.0 0:01 top
1 root 15 0 236 236 204 S 0.0 0.0 0:04 init
2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
4 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kswapd
5 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
6 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kupdated
7 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kinoded
9 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 mdrecoveryd
12 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 scsi_eh_0
16 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kjournald
79 root 0 -20 0 0 0 SW< 0.0 0.0 0:00 lvm-mpd
396 root 21 0 624 624 528 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 dhcpcd
424 root 15 0 668 668 548 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 syslogd
427 root 15 0 1052 1052 412 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 klogd
463 root 16 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 khubd
633 bin 15 0 404 404 320 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 portmap
671 root 16 0 1568 1568 1296 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 sshd
750 root 15 0 1380 1380 1156 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 smpppd
933 root 15 0 1452 1452 1136 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 master
956 at 18 0 544 544 460 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 atd
971 root 15 0 612 612 516 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 cron
992 postfix 15 0 1396 1396 1100 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 pickup
993 postfix 15 0 1724 1724 1360 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 qmgr
1051 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1060 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1061 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1062 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1063 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1064 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1065 root 15 0 704 704 588 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 nscd
1067 root 15 0 664 664 572 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 kdm
1090 root 16 0 492 492 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
1091 root 15 0 492 492 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
1092 root 15 0 492 492 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
1093 root 15 0 492 492 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
1094 root 15 0 492 492 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
1095 root 16 0 492 492 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
1097 root 15 0 1264 1264 956 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 kdm
1122 root 16 0 1224 1220 1000 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 kde
1160 root 15 0 7496 7492 7300 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 kdeinit
1163 root 15 0 7640 7636 7372 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 kdeinit
1166 root 15 0 8752 8748 8368 S 0.0 0.8 0:00 kdeinit
1168 root 15 0 35888 11M 9328 S 0.0 1.0 0:00 kdeinit
1179 root -51 0 5224 5224 3936 S 0.0 0.5 0:00 artsd
1185 root 15 0 37968 13M 10924 S 0.0 1.2 0:00 kdeinit
1188 root 15 0 336 336 268 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 kwrapper
1190 root 15 0 35540 10M 9100 S 0.0 1.0 0:00 kdeinit
1192 root 15 0 35400 10M 7984 S 0.0 1.0 0:00 kinternet
1196 root 15 0 42564 17M 14128 R 0.0 1.7 0:01 kdeinit
1199 root 15 0 36888 12M 10164 S 0.0 1.1 0:00 kdeinit
1201 root 15 0 36216 11M 9724 S 0.0 1.1 0:00 kdeinit
1206 root 15 0 35268 10M 7968 S 0.0 1.0 0:00 kalarmd
1208 root 15 0 37436 12M 9816 S 0.0 1.2 0:00 knotes
1309 root 15 0 1640 1640 1232 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 bash

<End>

Thanks for your time,
peteheff

Hi,

Can you try this out ?

Please create a bootdisk floppy ( mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 <kernel-Version>.

Set BIOS to boot from floppy drive as first bootable drive.

Boot from floppy using this and THEN start XWindows.

Check the speed. I suspect this is related to my problem too which is posted as "Xwindows is slow with multi-partitioning".

BRgds

Didn't do the floppy thing but installed another HD and put Linux onto it using the entire drive.

Although I did not spend any time setting up graphics cards etc. it loaded and ran the K programs about 150 faster than on the original install (i.e. did not go for a 25 second snooze!).

So rk_carols' point about the partitioning seems credible and like rk_carol I have looked around and found nothing related to this sort of problem.

While inserting my original HD today I accidentally knocked my network card out and my original install ran fine!

So, off to find out what sort of conflict my network card was causing.

hey this maybe a stupid post (im a newbie too) but i had the same problem and it was cos of my hostname for some reason. i had it set to charlie and everythign was soooooo slow, then i set it to charlie.localdomain and everythign was fine. dont know why this happened but it did.
anyway hope that was useful.

Charlie's problem is NOT related to the XWindows being slow on startup. It is more related to the nsswitch / DNS lookup option that tries to resolve IP to Names.

We need an X-pert ( I am going to start digging into this when I find some time ( Alas, I have heard this one before ! ).