Opensuse 11.4 very slow on 8 GB RAM i5 processor

Question

EDIT : This is when top is run with "M" . Snapshot when Eclipse starts ( using "iotop") Snapshot when Eclipse building workspace After Eclipse has done its thing

Its as slow as before and brings everything to a halt :(

I have a OpenSuse 11.4 64 bit installed. Earlier the system was fast. Now Eclipse takes forever to open and then takes 5 minutes to build workspace ( No kidding! ) . Here is how top looks on the system when opening eclipse :

Tasks: 181 total,   1 running, 180 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  5.3%us,  1.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 57.2%id, 35.8%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8099348k total,  8046104k used,    53244k free,    46904k buffers
Swap:  2103292k total,        0k used,  2103292k free,  7055848k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                               
 1778 root      20   0  137m  19m  10m S    4  0.3   0:04.92 Xorg                                                                                                                                                  
    1 root      20   0 12460  864  724 S    0  0.0   0:00.88 init                                                                                                                                                  
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                                                                                                                                              
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.10 ksoftirqd/0                                                                                                                                           
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0                                                                                                                                           
    5 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/u:0                                                                                                                                           
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0                                                                                                                                           
    7 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0                                                                                                                                            
    8 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1                                                                                                                                           
    9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.44 kworker/1:0                                                                                                                                           
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1                                                                                                                                           
   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.58 kworker/0:1                                                                                                                                           
   12 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/1                                                                                                                                            
   13 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/2                                                                                                                                           
   14 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/2:0                                                                                                                                           
   15 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/2                                                                                                                                           
   16 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/2                                                                                                                                            
   17 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/3                                                                                                                                           
   18 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/3:0                                                                                                                                           
   19 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/3                                                                                                                                           
   20 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/3                                                                                                                                            
   21 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuset                                                                                                                                                
   22 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper                                                                                                                                               
   23 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 netns                                                                                                                                                 
   24 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 sync_supers                                                                                                                                           
   25 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 bdi-default                                                                                                                                           
   26 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kintegrityd                                                                                                                                           
   27 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kblockd                                                                                                                                               
   28 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid                                                                                                                                                
   29 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpi_notify                                                                                                                                          
   30 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpi_hotplug                                                                                                                                         
   31 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ata_sff                                                                                                                                               
   32 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd                                                                                                                                                 
   33 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kseriod                                                                                                                                               
   34 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 md                                                                                                                                                    
   35 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kondemand                                                                                                                                             
   36 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khungtaskd                                                                                                                                            
   37 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:01.15 kswapd0                                                                                                                                               
   38 root      25   5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksmd                                                                                                                                                  
   39 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 fsnotify_mark                                                                                                                                         
   40 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 aio                                                                                                                                                   
   41 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 crypto                                                                                                                                                
   45 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthrotld  

I have only Eclipse running at this point of time and while Eclipse takes its own sweet time :( , even the browser does not open. Why is the system crawling ? Any help would be great

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have too much memory in use. See that line which says:

Mem: 8099348k total, 8046104k used, 53244k free,

That is the first clue. The second clue will have to come later when you run top, and then press the capital M key. That will sort the processes so that the memory hogs are at the top. Chances are it is one process with a memory leak, but it might be something else, for instance are you running SOLR with a db that keeps on growing?

iotop is fine for finding out what kind of IO you are doing, but chances are you will just learn that it is general disk IO. If you had more RAM then you would have a bigger disk cache and therefore, less disk IO. What does top show you after Eclipse has done its thing? Maybe you just have too many plugins loaded?

Also, free -mt is a better way to see the actual buffer cache size. There will be a line that looks like:

-/+ buffers/cache:       3996       8475

and the second of the two numbers is the amound of RAM used for buffer caching that could be made available to an application. The output that I gave is from a server running SOLR and another Java webapp with 12G of total RAM.

If I were in your shoes I would start Eclipse from a shell prompt so that you can see stderr log messages, then monitor top with the M option, (or repeatedly run free -mt) while Eclipse is loading to see if you can correlate the bump in RAM usage with what is happening at the time.

Also, the deed may have been done at boot time by something else, maybe too many Apache mods or something similar. You could always add a special init script to do similar memory monitoring with timestamps during bootup.

Answer 2

I hope you are already running something newer than openSUSE 11.4, so just for the posterity: judging by the iotop screen shots the sluggishness had been very likely caused by the heavy I/O processes - namely preload and tracker-store. While both are supposed to be helping considered - both are supposed to be helping, but under some circumstances they become performance hogs (plus having all your personal data indexed doesn't necessarily have to be a good idea from the security point of view either).