Awful DE pferformance / Desktop freezes on high HD load

[milius]

Hi!

I just installed and fully updates mint cinnamon 14, everything should be stock, close to no customizations. The Desktop performance is awful, everything freezes while hd / disk I/O is high (p.E.: while I wipe free disk space with secure-delete or even just while the package manager is performing a search) - can move the mouse but nothing happens when I click somewhere.

Tested the same with vanilla kernel and with a custom kernel with BFQ. Same operations work fine with both, no Desktop freezes. Only the mint kernel has this problem. Setting nice did not help (much).


confused is responsible for that and will it be fixed soon?
Does anyone know if the Ubuntu kernel has the same problem?
I can't keep compiling custom kernels and fixing strange behaviour for that box, it's supposed to update automatically etc in the future.

[xenopeek]

Linux Mint 14 is using the Ubuntu 12.10 kernel. You may try upgrading to a newer mainline Ubuntu kernel. To do so, open Update Manager and go to Edit > Preferences and enable level 4 and 5 upgrades.

I don't have any of the issues you describe, so I imagine it is also a combination with your hardware / drivers.

[Orbmiser]

Yep thinking graphics card and installed default driver?

Need to open a term and enter command

Code: Select all

inxi -G

And paste results. Like mine shows using defualt driver and rendering enabled.

orbmiser@Winterfell ~ $ inxi -G
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710 [Radeon HD 4350]
X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1680x1050@60.0hz, 1680x1050@59.9hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV710 GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 9.0

And if I switch to Cinnamon 2D degrades desktop performance to near unusable. Which means not using rendering on card.
And everything graphic has to be done by the Cpu.
.

[milius]

I'm using nouveau... don't see any problems with it.

Looks more as if it's the HD, because it still happens in TTY if I kill X. Even logging into a second TTY takes a long time. Looks like bad IO scheduling... like one process (usually the first one started as root?) can hog all the I/O and everything else that needs the HD just keeps freezing...

I'll try those lvl4/5 updates later... is there a place where I can information on how Mint's bugfixing / kernel updates / release stuff work? Like - for how long can a machine be stuck with a piece of buggy software due to organizational reasons? I've only been using bleeding edge / rolling release distros so far, and I have no idea how this version / lvl &/ upgrade stuff here works or what to expect...

[xenopeek]

Normally you kernel isn't upgraded, until you install a newer version of Linux Mint. If you have problems, you can upgrade your kernel manually.