Brief desktop freezes during disk IO

[charlieg]

Whenever my laptop is doing something with a bit of intensive IO (a very common one is running an update via Update Manager or via the CLI / apt-get) the Cinnamon desktop will briefly become unresponsive. This can be anything from 5s to about 30s.

It feels like it has become more pronounced as time as gone on, however it could just be that I have noticed them more as I have no real metric for measuring this. I upgraded from Mint 16 to Mint 17 then to 17.1 Rebecca. (EDIT: the more I think about it, the more I'm certain this didn't happen when Mint was fresh.)

The main partition is ext4. Does performance degrade over time? Is there a way to counter this?

Of course I am aware that disk IO is a limiting factor in performance, but it shouldn't be causing my desktop to freeze entirely when busy.

[austin.texas]

Please provide the specs for your machine with

Code: Select all

inxi -Fzx

Do you have limited ram?

[charlieg]

I have 4GB of RAM. I guess perhaps it is possible the GFX card is using RAM? I wonder if that's the case (it's one of these new fangled dual chip GFX setups, with an integrated Intel chipset and a separate Nvidia card).

Code: Select all

charles-mint-Z500 charles # inxi -Fzx
System:    Host: charles-mint-Z500 Kernel: 3.16.0-29-generic x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.8.2) 
           Desktop: Gnome Distro: Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca
Machine:   System: LENOVO product: 20202 version: Lenovo IdeaPad Z500
           Mobo: LENOVO model: INVALID version: 31900003Std Bios: LENOVO version: 71CN51WW(V1.21) date: 07/12/2013
CPU:       Dual core Intel Core i5-3230M CPU (-HT-MCP-) cache: 3072 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 10376.4 
           Clock Speeds: 1: 2216.093 MHz 2: 2163.890 MHz 3: 2104.882 MHz 4: 2114.531 MHz
Graphics:  Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0 
           Card-2: NVIDIA GF108M [GeForce GT 635M] bus-ID: 01:00.0 
           X.org: 1.15.1 driver: intel tty size: 80x21 Advanced Data: N/A for root 
Audio:     Card: Intel 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.16.0-29-generic
Network:   Card-1: Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter driver: ath9k bus-ID: 03:00.0
           IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>
           Card-2: Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller 
           driver: r8169 ver: 2.3LK-NAPI port: 2000 bus-ID: 02:00.0
           IF: eth0 state: down mac: <filter>
           Card-3: Atheros usb-ID: 0cf3:3004
           IF: N/A state: N/A speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: N/A
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 1000.2GB (31.9% used) 1: id: /dev/sda model: ST1000LM024_HN size: 1000.2GB temp: 27C 
Partition: ID: / size: 429G used: 298G (74%) fs: ext4 ID: swap-1 size: 4.15GB used: 0.44GB (11%) fs: swap 
RAID:      No RAID devices detected - /proc/mdstat and md_mod kernel raid module present
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 58.0C mobo: N/A 
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A 
Info:      Processes: 205 Uptime: 1 day Memory: 2801.4/3814.5MB Runlevel: 2 Gcc sys: 4.8.2 Client: Shell inxi: 1.8.4 

[richyrich]

Code: Select all

Memory: 2801.4/3814.5MB

Something is really eating up your memory ??? Try the Task Manager, or install and run Htop, to see if you can determine the memory hogging culprit.

[charlieg]

Code: Select all

Memory: 2801.4/3814.5MB

Something is really eating up your memory ???

I have 2 versions of Eclipse and Firefox open. I'm sorry, I don't see what relevance this has. 70% memory taken up - so what? Why would that lead to the desktop freezing when applications are pushing data in/out of the memory?

It seems more relevant if indeed the onboard video is being used by Cinammon - but that is a failing of the configuration as opposed to an issue with memory usage. I want to be able to operate my laptop with a few applications open (and given that Firefox is a 1gb app these days, I don't want to close everything just to open that).

So my next step is to establish whether Cinammon/X are using the crap video card or the good one. Time to investigate Bumblebee? Hints appreciated.

[charlieg]

First bout of investigation turning up these kind of links referring to outdated Ubuntu versions:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics