Sysmonitor: What is "Load average"?

[Zweitaktmotor]

Hi,

I hope I've picked the right forum for this question (otherwise, please move as appropriate)

I have several PCs and laptops running on LMDE, but something has stopped me from upgrading them all from LMDE3 to LMDE4:

Ever since I did the upgrade from LMDE3 32bit MATE to LMDE 64bit CINNAMON on the two laptops, they have become painfully slow, to the point that they are almost unresponsive at times. They are not the most powerful machines, but not terribly old either. I am currently writing this on a HP Stream 10.

The only indication that something is amiss becomes visible when I install and activate the System Monitor applet in the status bar.

Here I have 4 graphs:

CPU (yellow) goes up and down depending on what I ask the machine to do
Memory (blue) shows about mid-range, up to two thirds of my 2GB in use, the rest is dark blue, apparently used as cache
Network (green) stays very low (I am on a fast broadband connection)

This all seems normal, BUT:

There is a fourth graph called "Load average" and this is almost constantly at the top. When I hover my mouse pointer over it, I get readings such as "5.27,4.38,2.21" which don't mean anything to me.

Opening up the full system monitor, I cannot see any resource hogging processes, but there is nothing to tell me what this "Load" is either.

As I said, I have kept all my other machines on LMDE3, even though this is no longer supported. I would love to upgrade them, but I'd rather keep them in a usable state.

Could perhaps someone try and explain to me what the problem might be?

Many thanks.

[axisofevil]

The three numbers are a measure of the system load over the last 1,5,15 minutes.
There are many applets that you could be using, so you would need to send a screenshot of your graphs.
You could try the top command, which will also show this system load + any heavy processes.

I'm willing to bet that you are either using a lot of swap storage - or if you have no swap, you have insufficient free memory.
LMDE is a fairly heavyweight distro, possibly not best suited to a 2GB RAM PC.

[Zweitaktmotor]

Hi Axis,

I am using the sysmonitor@orcus app that can be installed in the system tray. There is also a separate graph for swap activity that stays completely down.

Please find 3 screen shots attached:

Laptop graph: Yellow = CPU, Blue = Memory, Empty = Swap, Green = Network, Red = Load

I had just started the laptop, called the BBC Web site (well written and always a good benchmark) and the Linux Mint Forum site. After this, the Load graph was about halfway up but jumped almost to the top as soon as I had started the standard screenshot facility (gnome-screenshot). The same happens if I start other programs. As soon as Load hits the top, the laptop slows down.

As advised, I ran "top" (please see screen shot) and it appears that Cinnamon is the heaviest user. Unfortunately, the LMDE4 installation ISO is no longer available with MATE.

For comparison, I am attaching a screen shot of my graphs on a PC with LMDE3 MATE and a similar load of programs.

PC graph.png (13.65 KiB) Viewed 4540 times

I am only allowed to attach 3 screenshots, but running top on this machine shows also cinnamon (???), but just with a CPU reading of 2.1%. Load always stays down and the machine does not lock up.

So is it Cinnamon causing the problems? How easy is it to kick it out and go back to MATE?

Many thanks.

[axisofevil]

Probably not - it varies a lot.

Earlier, you said "Memory (blue) shows about mid-range, up to two thirds of my 2GB in use, the rest is dark blue, apparently used as cache"

This would cause problems - but 8GB should be more than enough.
Linux will try to find a use for as much memory as possible - unused memory is wasted memory!
Since you are running FireFox (with attendant 'Web Content' process) this is a reasonably heavy load and is probably the cause of the Cinnamon CPU%.

The first 5 fields of the top page [ 3rd line ] show

Code: Select all

us, user    : time running un-niced user processes
sy, system  : time running kernel processes
ni, nice    : time running niced user processes
id, idle    : time spent in the kernel idle handler
wa, IO-wait : time waiting for I/O completion

Your CPU is idle 68% of the time, so I wouldn't worry.

[Zweitaktmotor]

Your CPU is idle 68% of the time, so I wouldn't worry.

I know, but it still does not solve the problem. For comparison, I have a 14 year old netbook, running at 900MHz with 2GB RAM. This is absolutely fine with LMDE3 32bit, not lockups, only slightly slow as to be expected.

But is not capable of running 64bit and I bet even with LMDE4 32bit, it will lock up very quickly.

Perhaps I should try just to prove the point...

[axisofevil]

For 2GB you need a lightweight desktop - I would try AntiX

See https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... quirements

[Zweitaktmotor]

Thanks, sounds like a good alternative. I'll give it a try.

[Monsta]

Unfortunately, the LMDE4 installation ISO is no longer available with MATE.

Well, LMDE 3 already had only Cinnamon ISOs. Did you upgrade your systems from MATE edition of LMDE 2?