"why is my Linux so damn slow?"

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 13:42:25 -0600, Rick wrote:

> I am curious about the Rescheduling interrupts.
> I do not have a dual core system so I have no rescheduling interrupts.
> 
> I do not know how many rescheduling interrupts is too many. 

A running Firefox, that displays an ordinary News website with several
animated GIFs and a couple of Flash ads, here increases the resched.interrupt
count by ~100 or more per second. After a few hours of uptime, that will
pile up, of course. Marko has quoted the uptime with his "top" output in
the blog post. To Marko, you can run

  watch -d1 cat /proc/interrupts

in a terminal with and without your mostly used apps running to get
a better overview about how the numbers change.

I wonder whether the slowness is specific to running X or only X together
with a heavily used Firefox? What other tests have been performed in an
attempt to find out whether the system is sluggish in general? Perhaps
give "powertop" a try. It reports quite some things about devices
that are in use 100% and about stuff that wakes up the cpu often.


In either case, it doesn't sound normal. Certainly not with an average
load so low as quoted.