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?
Bev.
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.
Once logged in, type htop
This will start Htop. There's a bar graph across the top called CPU. If the computer's being slow, I'd expect this to be running around 90-100%
Then, once only, press F6 to bring up the sort by menu. Cursor up or down until Percent CPU is highlighted and press enter. This will ensure the displayed tasks are sorted by how much CPU they are using. Whatever task or tasks are at the top are probably what's hogging the CPU. If there's something at between 70 and 100 %, then that's probably the culprit. Alternatively, if there's something at less than 50% but it's at the top of the list of tasks, then that process might be i/o bound - i.e. trying to get stuff from the disk or memory, and waiting for that.
Report back what you get. Press F10 or Q for Quit to exit htop To get back to the normal gui screen, press CTRL-ALT-F7. If that doesn't work, try CTRL-ALT-F6 or CTRL-ALT-F8.
Other thoughts - lack of disk space, or insufficient memory, causing the swap file to be in constant use. Check the first by typing df -h in a prompt If anything has free space less than 1GB, or use % greater than 90, then that may be the problem.
You may be able to see how much swap is in use by using swapon -s in a prompt. Alternatively there's a real-time graph in ubuntu which you can get somehow, but I don't recall how. Is it called system monitor in the menu?
Good luck! Steve
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.
<snip>
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.
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.
<snip>
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
On 01/12/15 16:35, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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.
<snip>
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
Do you mean 'id'? If so, a huge figure. 99.2. If you mean 'wa' then we can rest easy. 0.0 - 1.0
df -h gives us:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 71G 30G 37G 45% / none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup udev 483M 4.0K 483M 1% /dev tmpfs 100M 1.2M 98M 2% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 496M 156K 496M 1% /run/shm none 100M 56K 100M 1% /run/user
Bev.
On 01/12/15 17:10, Bev Nicolson wrote:
On 01/12/15 16:35, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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.
<snip>
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.
I'm still monitoring it for any glimpse of a clue. The only one so far is python3 which causes a short peak (I think it was around 53% last time but it went by so fast I couldn't write it down) and then vanishes from the htop log.
Bev
Do you have anything plugged into the USB, other than KB/mouse?
Only, when I plugged a card reader into my machine, it took ages to boot.
-- Sent from my Psion 5MX Original Message From: Bev Nicolson Sent: Saturday, 5 December 2015 09:19 To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] PC slow to boot prt 2
On 01/12/15 17:10, Bev Nicolson wrote:
On 01/12/15 16:35, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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.
<snip>
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.
I'm still monitoring it for any glimpse of a clue. The only one so far is python3 which causes a short peak (I think it was around 53% last time but it went by so fast I couldn't write it down) and then vanishes from the htop log.
Bev
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On 01/12/15 17:10, Bev Nicolson wrote:
Do you mean 'id'? If so, a huge figure. 99.2. If you mean 'wa' then we can rest easy. 0.0 - 1.0
ID, is "Idle", as in doing nothing. 99.2 means it's really not doing anything. WA is Wait, waiting for IO, typically waiting for a disk. The above figures represent a system that's should be OK.
df -h gives us:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 71G 30G 37G 45% / none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup udev 483M 4.0K 483M 1% /dev tmpfs 100M 1.2M 98M 2% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 496M 156K 496M 1% /run/shm none 100M 56K 100M 1% /run/user
No problems with that either.
And a short lived spike running a python program's not a problem either. No clues so far!
Sorry.
Steve
On 05/12/15 20:05, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 01/12/15 17:10, Bev Nicolson wrote:
Do you mean 'id'? If so, a huge figure. 99.2. If you mean 'wa' then we can rest easy. 0.0 - 1.0
ID, is "Idle", as in doing nothing. 99.2 means it's really not doing anything. WA is Wait, waiting for IO, typically waiting for a disk. The above figures represent a system that's should be OK.
df -h gives us:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 71G 30G 37G 45% / none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup udev 483M 4.0K 483M 1% /dev tmpfs 100M 1.2M 98M 2% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 496M 156K 496M 1% /run/shm none 100M 56K 100M 1% /run/user
No problems with that either.
And a short lived spike running a python program's not a problem either. No clues so far!
Sorry.
Steve
The last thing to spike longer than a second was a usr/bin/python file (didn't see which) (don't expect that offers much in the way of a clue either.) On having a look at what was in the usr/ file, I see I have several version of Python. (Python, Python 2, 2.7, 3, 3.4, 3m). Which seems odd to me. Or is it entirely reasonable?
Bev.
On 06/12/15 16:26, Bev Nicolson wrote:
The last thing to spike longer than a second was a usr/bin/python file (didn't see which) (don't expect that offers much in the way of a clue either.) On having a look at what was in the usr/ file, I see I have several version of Python. (Python, Python 2, 2.7, 3, 3.4, 3m). Which seems odd to me. Or is it entirely reasonable?
That matches what I have
Steve
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Bev Nicolson -
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steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk