On 01/12/15 15:07, Bev Nicolson wrote:
On 09/02/15 14:10, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 09/02/15 13:21, Bev Nicolson wrote:
I asked about my slow to boot (and sometimes slow to shut down) pc a while back now and have htop installed. I should have asked this then but which bit of the info it gives me do I need to give you lot in order to diagnose the problem?
OK, You need to start HTOP whilst it's being slow. You can either start a command prompt from the menu system, but I think the best way would be to CTRL-ALT-F2 to bring up a full screen text console. You'll need to log in using your usual user name and password.
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Sorry it's been an absolute age since I said anything about this. I can’t log in while it's booting to check but I can raise htop directly afterwards.
(At the moment CPU 2% - 4% and Memory c 648.0 of 991.6 MiB I'll check again though. I have checked the Startup Applications and there's barely anything listed.)
Bev.
Well, if it's being slow and you run htop, if the processor (CPU) usage is high, then the top one or two tasks will show you what's causing the slowness. However, if it's being slow, and the top tasks are only using a few percent of the processor, then it's not processor hogging that's the problem. if this is the case, run top (not htop) and see if the number before "wa" is high. If that's the case, the system is "waiting" for hardware - usually a disk. Again, if this is the case, try sudo iotop
This will tell you which task (or tasks) are using the disk, usually in processor usage order. You may find that it's something like "find" (or locate) updating the list of files on the disk that it stores, or some other scheduled task, or firefox updating its cache. (I've currently got updatedb.mlocate hogging my system)
Perhaps your disk is getting full? df -h will show how much space is left in human readable form.
If it's usually slow during boot, it could perhaps be shown using an app called pybootchartgui. It requires bootchart to be installed too. Once this is installed, it creates a log and a graph of the boot process, showing which process starts when and how long it takes. I can't remember where this is stored though - I'm sure googling will show you where it is. Don't forget to uninstall it once you've fixed the problem though, as creating the boot chart graph (picture) takes time and will use disk space.
HTH Steve