Bug 176694 - Rawhide kernel made X really slow
Summary: Rawhide kernel made X really slow
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: kernel
Version: rawhide
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Dave Jones
QA Contact: Brian Brock
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2005-12-30 04:40 UTC by Warren Togami
Modified: 2015-01-04 22:23 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-12-31 22:03:51 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
/proc/kmalloc before wiggling gedit window (28.73 KB, text/plain)
2005-12-31 00:50 UTC, Warren Togami
no flags Details
/proc/kmalloc after wiggling gedit window (28.73 KB, text/plain)
2005-12-31 00:51 UTC, Warren Togami
no flags Details
Various rpm related kmalloc (13.06 KB, application/x-bzip2)
2005-12-31 11:43 UTC, Bojan Smojver
no flags Details

Description Warren Togami 2005-12-30 04:40:47 UTC
kernel-2.6.14-1.1796_FC5
kernel-2.6.14-1.1800_FC5
Something in these new kernels made everything in my X much slower.  This is
apparent with my GNOME multiload_applet using a constant 20-35% CPU, Xorg is
busy during this, and any operation in X (minimizing, maximizing, switching
windows, etc.) uses more CPU as it waits on Xorg.

kernel-2.6.14-1.1786_FC5
Rebooting back into this kernel brings load back down to normal.

Any idea what may have changed to make Xorg and X apps to work harder?

Comment 1 Warren Togami 2005-12-30 04:41:40 UTC
Hardware:
IBM Thinkpad T41
Radeon 7500

Comment 2 Dave Jones 2005-12-30 05:40:21 UTC
kmalloc tracing.  It'll be turned off in a few days.

Curious its hitting you so hard though. Can you do

cat /proc/kmalloc >km1
*wiggle some windows around*
cat /proc/kmalloc >km2

and attach those ? I'm curious whats doing so many kernel allocations.


Comment 3 Warren Togami 2005-12-31 00:50:58 UTC
Created attachment 122657 [details]
/proc/kmalloc before wiggling gedit window

Comment 4 Warren Togami 2005-12-31 00:51:52 UTC
Created attachment 122658 [details]
/proc/kmalloc after wiggling gedit window

Comment 5 Warren Togami 2005-12-31 00:54:07 UTC
The above tests were with kernel-2.6.14-1.1800_FC5

Hmm... it seems like other things beyond X have heavy CPU usage.  Simply typing
in Firefox is slow and induces 100% CPU spikes.  CPU maxes out for a few seconds
whenever I switch windows, and it uses maybe 50% if I wiggle around a window. 
vpnc downloading at 100KB/sec maxed out CPU usage too.

Let me know if you need any other information.

Comment 6 Bojan Smojver 2005-12-31 02:04:54 UTC
It isn't just X. The whole systems becomes 2x slower. I just recompiled the
kernel from the text console, which normally takes 2 hours - it took 4!

My hardware spec is here:

http://www.rexursive.com/articles/linuxonhpze4201.html

Comment 7 Dave Jones 2005-12-31 04:34:42 UTC
bojan, can you repeat the process in comment #2 please ?
Seeing different profiles from different situations may bring about some other
interesting pieces of info.

The interesting bits in Warren's profile I saw earlier in another report.
Audit is really heavyweight. In Warrens profile, it had done nearly 40 million
allocations since boot up.  On my desktop it's almost constantly writing
something or other to /var/log/audit.   We have to make sure to turn that off by
default before FC5 ships.


Comment 8 Bojan Smojver 2005-12-31 11:42:42 UTC
I did the following:

rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.14-1.1796.src.rpm
rpmbuild -bp --target=i686 kernel.spec

The attached files show /proc/kmalloc before and after each of the commands. If
you want me to do similar stuff for kernel compile, I can, but it's going to
take until next year ;-)

Anyhow, these two a visibly slower than before, so I think they are probably
good representatives of slowness. BTW, I'm running the box with SELinux enabled
(targeted) and auditd is running too.

PS. You may see X springing into action here and there - that's because I was
flicking between text consoles and X while doing the above and writing this comment.

Comment 9 Bojan Smojver 2005-12-31 11:43:58 UTC
Created attachment 122660 [details]
Various rpm related kmalloc

It appears that unpacking archives is particularly slow.

Comment 10 Dave Jones 2005-12-31 22:03:51 UTC
ok, thanks.  I've disabled it in the current build, which will go out to rawhide
tomorrow. You can grab it early at
http://people.redhat.com/davej/kernels/Fedora/devel/

thanks again for the testdata.



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