Need advice on performance troubleshooting

[Roberto Ragusa]

Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Sunday, October 24, 2010 04:18:02 stan wrote:
>> On Sun, 24 Oct 2010 02:38:23 +0100
>>
>> Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I am experiencing a gradual performance drop problem --- having a
>>> machine running 24/7, after some time (say, two weeks) the system
>>> becomes increasingly slow, in terms of desktop response.
>> <snip>
>>
>>> The symptoms appear like something is leaking memory --- slowly
>>> (noticable only after two weeks of continuous running), but
>>> cumulatively.
>> This probably isn't much help, but what happens if you log out when it
>> starts to slow, stop X, and then start X?  I mean, go to runlevel 3,
>> then back to runlevel 5.  If everything is OK again, it tells you that
>> the problem is in X. If it isn't, the problem is in the system part,
>> the OS.
> 
> Just tried it, logged out and logged back in. Didn't go to runlevel 3, X gets 
> restarted with only logging out and in, AFAIK.
> 
> Anyway, you seem to be right! Restarting X purged most of the swap, from
> 1.3 GB it went down to 31.4 MB. And the system regained responsiveness.
> 
> So apparently something inside X is leaking memory. But X has many components 
> --- compiz, emerald, KDE, Xorg, intel driver, etc., so any idea how do I 
> diagnose this further?

You can not be sure that the memory is used by X; it could be one
of the graphical apps running in your X session. By restarting X you
restarted all of them too.

Keep an eye on the output of this command and see if something
increases suspiciously after a day or two.

  ps ww -e k -rss o pid,pmem,command,rss,size,vsz|head -20

I have a similar problem; my session has been up for more than 130 days
and it is getting slower and slower, especially on desktop switching
(but still usable). It looks like X is leaking/fragmenting/doingsomethingwrong,
but my configuration is very peculiar (F10 with KDE3 and nvidia binary driver,
many many applications running), so I have no hope to track it down and have
it solved.


-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it