Internet traffic causes ~70% CPU load

petermbm · 10-11-2003, 02:05 AM

Hello,

I recently decided to migrate from Redhat to Slack, and I am quite happy with slackware, still there is a problem: Whenever I download anything from the Internet, the downloading process takes about 70% of my cpu time away and therefore makes everything else slow. This happens for me on 2 different computers with different hardware - Redhat 9 doesn't have this problem on the 2 PCs.

The Hardware of the two PCs:
1) AMD Athlon XP 2500+ on a nforce 2 mainboard with onboard LAN
2) AMD Duron 1300 on an KT133 mainboard and a 3com ethernet card

Thanks in advance

nirvanix · 10-11-2003, 10:23 AM

I don't believe this is normal. I'm running Slackware 9.1 and don't experience that kind of load. I just ran a test - I'm listening to internet radio (streaming 128kb) and I downloaded a large file. Sytem monitor (ksim) told me that I was using 23% cpu at the most.
I have an AMD XP 2200+
How much RAM do you have? If you've got less than 256Mb, that would hurt your performance as you'll be swapping a lot. Did you try different downloading tools? FTP, etc?

petermbm · 10-11-2003, 10:53 AM

I have 512MB of ram so I dont think this causes the problem. I tried mozilla, kget and gftp and all got the same problem(on both computers). btw its not the download tool that uses the cpu time, top shows system to be using 70%

wuck · 10-11-2003, 11:56 AM

What process does take all that load?

nirvanix · 10-11-2003, 05:23 PM

Yes, top gives a breakdown by process of the cpu usage, so which one is it that gobbles up the resources? It's constant, or just for any kind of download? Let me know and I'll compare it to mine.

Speedfreak · 10-12-2003, 12:31 AM

Hi there, I too am using a NForce-2 LAN controller and had the exact same problem as you... Massive CPU load for simple webbrowsing and downloading. And here is the magic fix! Pop this line in your /etc/modules.conf file "options nvnet optimization=1"
Without the ""
This works for me and my Epox LAN controller using the nvnet module.

//N

petermbm · 10-14-2003, 11:51 AM

thanks for the help I'll try it tomorrow
btw may it be that its a kernel 2.4.22 specific problem? mandrake 9.2rc2 got the same problem for me and uses 2.4.22 too, just like slackware (on the redhat installation i use at the moment i got 2.4.20 installed)