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opensuse slows down after some time

Hello,

I’m having some trouble with Opensuse that I didn’t have with other distributions.(No problem with gentoo and arch).

about every 3 months or so I need to re-install the OS because KDE becomes extremely sluggish. Programs take a long time to load, sometimes Thunderbird wont even load and it just becomes buggy and slow. This happens eventually over time.

I feel that Im missing something. Is there some kind of maintenance that I shoud be doing like clearing the temp directory?

Some info:
Opensuse 12.1
kde 4
swap 4GB(usually not even used)
Physical Ram 4GB
CPU 2.6ghz phenom with load not maxing out
5.5TB LVM ext4
250GB main drive ext4

I recently re-installed so I don’t have the problem now but is there something I should be doing to maintain my system? I could always install Gentoo again but that doesn’t really explain why this is happening.

I've never encountered that on my OpenSUSE installations. My laptop on 12.1 is running as fast as the day I installed it a few months ago.

Have you tried running "top" to see if there is anything using an excessive amount of processor time or RAM? What software have you installed on the system? Have you tried other DEs? I typically use XFCE since I'm not a big fan of KDE 4. What's your disk usage like (output of df -h)?

I've had OpenSUSE for years and not seen this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by suicidaleggroll (Post 4840943)

Unfortunately, I recently re-installed so after using top everything looks normal, with ktorrent at the top using 15%(it may be different when the problems start creeping in). Thank you very much for the top command. It looks very helpful. Also, disk usage for my main drive looks normal but my LVM sometimes gets up to 95%(main system is not on the LVM. Its only for storage and not accessed by the system unless I move files around)

I recently emptied out my LVM so now its really low.

Code:

Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

rootfs                          89G  5.2G  79G  7% /

devtmpfs                      1.9G  12K  1.9G  1% /dev

tmpfs                          2.0G  1.6M  2.0G  1% /dev/shm

tmpfs                          2.0G  704K  2.0G  1% /run

/dev/sdb2                      89G  5.2G  79G  7% /

tmpfs                          2.0G    0  2.0G  0% /sys/fs/cgroup

tmpfs                          2.0G  704K  2.0G  1% /var/lock

tmpfs                          2.0G  704K  2.0G  1% /var/run

tmpfs                          2.0G    0  2.0G  0% /media

/dev/mapper/bigdrive-bigdrive  4.5T  218G  4.1T  5% /bigdrive

/dev/sdb4                      137G  1.1G  129G  1% /home

/dev/sdb1                      144M  28M  109M  21% /boot

Also, is it normal to have so many tmpfs?

I really like KDE 4 because of the snap to side options for the windows.

The main applications that I install and use are:
Libre Office
Ktorrent(I think this may be tied to my trouble but not sure how)
Handbrake
Samba
Firefox

It's perfectly normal to have a bunch of tmpfs mounts, those are just special directories which are being mounted in RAM for speed reasons (tmpfs=RAM). Your df output looks perfectly normal, but as you mentioned, you just reinstalled the OS and are not currently experiencing the problem. Unfortunately this is probably one of those cases that can only be diagnosed while it's rearing its ugly head.

FWIW - I only mentioned my laptop earlier, but my home server also runs OpenSUSE 11.4. The OS was installed about 18 months ago, that machine serves as a server for over 2TB of media to several different Linux/Mac/Windows systems, it acts as a RAID backup for three different systems, it runs a very active FTP server, handles constant SSH throughput, and is also used for random programming tasks. That machine hasn't even been rebooted for 115 days, and it's still running as fast as ever. It's actually one of the most stable/reliable machines I've ever built, and I've been quite impressed with how well OpenSUSE has handled the load without any complaints or slowdowns/hiccups.

You might find latencytop useful.

I've run into this, but on Fedora.

In my case, it happens after a long time running due to Gnome/KDE (if you are using it)... when you logout, not all functions of gnome get terminated. These processes (and memory usage) accumulated over time until the system was very sluggish...

Once identified, it was easy to recover - I just logged in as root (on a virtual terminal) and did a "killall -u <user> -s 9". And I used the 9 signal because a simple termination signal didn't always work - some processes would get left around.

Thank you for all of your responses.

When my problem comes back(as it always seems to) I'll check top, disk usage and try to use the killall command.

Thank you again.