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From: Theo Markettos on 24 Feb 2010 09:06
I have a Dell Mini 9 netbook running Ubuntu, with 1GB RAM. Most of the time
when I have more than one application running it is tediously slow, to the
point that I sometimes have to wait seconds to switch windows. For example,
at the moment I have:

top - 13:51:43 up 4 days, 2:09, 5 users, load average: 3.32, 2.93, 2.82
Tasks: 137 total, 4 running, 133 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 71.2%us, 26.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 1.6%hi, 0.6%si,
0.0%st
Mem: 1017396k total, 995368k used, 22028k free, 67940k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 227784k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3844 atm26 20 0 627m 352m 27m R 66 35.5 618:00.14 epiphany-browse
22035 root 20 0 2060 512 436 R 58 0.1 0:01.98 hal-system-smbi
3893 atm26 20 0 206m 50m 19m S 40 5.1 167:45.10 liferea-bin
2911 root 20 0 344m 68m 13m S 23 6.9 107:06.22 Xorg
3560 atm26 20 0 24008 9324 6872 S 7 0.9 23:23.03 multiload-apple

and I'm just typing into a terminal, the rest are sitting in the background.
I use epiphany as it's lighter than Firefox, but I think Xorg and Flash are
a big eater of CPU cycles (must try flashblock for epiphany). I do try to
avoid bloated apps.

Ordinarily the answer to speeding a machine up is 'add more RAM'. I can
understand this from the point of view of reducing swapping, which is slow
and laggy. But this machine has no swap - indeed it only has 8GB of fairly
slow SSD so there would be no point. I have never received an 'out of
memory' error regarding RAM.

Is there still a likely performance gain by adding RAM? The only two
places I can see it might help are a) adding more cache for disc (but most
apps don't access disc that much) and b) allowing more of mmap()ed files to
be held in RAM. There's no activity light for the SSD so I have no idea how
much it is actually thrashing.

Another laptop I use is a 1.6GHz Centrino and a hard drive, and doesn't
suffer such slowdowns... it's now on 1.5GB of RAM but the Linux performance
was acceptable on 256MB (we won't mention how terrible XP was). So is it
worth adding RAM, or should I just conclude the Atom is
disappointingly slow?

Thanks
Theo
From: Martin Gregorie on 24 Feb 2010 10:03
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:06:33 +0000, Theo Markettos wrote:

> Is there still a likely performance gain by adding RAM? The only two
> places I can see it might help are a) adding more cache for disc (but
> most apps don't access disc that much) and b) allowing more of mmap()ed
> files to be held in RAM. There's no activity light for the SSD so I
> have no idea how much it is actually thrashing.
>
Install the sysstat package if you haven't done so already. iostat will
collect disk stats to show you if filesystem i/o is the problem.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
From: Gordon Henderson on 24 Feb 2010 11:47
In article <DAy*AYu4s(a)news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
Theo Markettos <theom+news(a)chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

>Ordinarily the answer to speeding a machine up is 'add more RAM'. I can
>understand this from the point of view of reducing swapping, which is slow
>and laggy. But this machine has no swap - indeed it only has 8GB of fairly
>slow SSD so there would be no point. I have never received an 'out of
>memory' error regarding RAM.

Both myself and wifey have an Acer Aspire Ones with 512MB of RAM and
the same 8GB SSD.

It's the SSD that's slow. Really slow. Like cold treacle slow. And even
slower on writes.

So look at the disk LED on the front - see if it's ON while it's going
slow. I use Debian and xfce4 with Firefox - it's a highly tuned system
with a custom compiled kernel though, and is generally usable - it passes
the wife test! But it's pared down to the bare minimum absolutely no
unneccessary daemons, etc. running.

When I upgrade it, (add more RAM) I'll move some things into a RAM disk -
there are some hints online for the AAO - you might want to google for
them as it's almost the same system.

>Is there still a likely performance gain by adding RAM? The only two
>places I can see it might help are a) adding more cache for disc (but most
>apps don't access disc that much) and b) allowing more of mmap()ed files to
>be held in RAM. There's no activity light for the SSD so I have no idea how
>much it is actually thrashing.

Oh - no LED. There is one on the AAO - when AAO goes slow, the disk LED
is ON solid.

>Another laptop I use is a 1.6GHz Centrino and a hard drive, and doesn't
>suffer such slowdowns... it's now on 1.5GB of RAM but the Linux performance
>was acceptable on 256MB (we won't mention how terrible XP was). So is it
>worth adding RAM, or should I just conclude the Atom is
>disappointingly slow?

The Atom is fine - I use one for my desktop and have a few servers with
them in - it's the SSD disk that's slow.

I've even seen mods for the AAO to put a CF card on to replace the
super slow SSD.

Gordon
From: Paul Rudin on 24 Feb 2010 11:55
Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet(a)drogon.net> writes:

> In article <DAy*AYu4s(a)news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
> Theo Markettos <theom+news(a)chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
>>Ordinarily the answer to speeding a machine up is 'add more RAM'. I can
>>understand this from the point of view of reducing swapping, which is slow
>>and laggy. But this machine has no swap - indeed it only has 8GB of fairly
>>slow SSD so there would be no point. I have never received an 'out of
>>memory' error regarding RAM.
>
> Both myself and wifey have an Acer Aspire Ones with 512MB of RAM and
> the same 8GB SSD.
>
> It's the SSD that's slow. Really slow. Like cold treacle slow. And even
> slower on writes.

My daughter has a dell mini 10v with Ubuntu and it's fine for normal
desktop use. The difference is it has a proper hard disc, so I guess
that adds weight to the idea that the SSD is the problem.
From: Theo Markettos on 24 Feb 2010 14:12
Paul Rudin <paul.nospam(a)rudin.co.uk> wrote:
> My daughter has a dell mini 10v with Ubuntu and it's fine for normal
> desktop use. The difference is it has a proper hard disc, so I guess
> that adds weight to the idea that the SSD is the problem.

So is it RAM or SSD I should be thinking of upgrading? On the other laptop,
Linux doesn't thrash disc too much, so I don't think it's waiting for files
to come in. And on the netbook there's no swap, so that won't slow things
down. So is it mmap() that's the problem, and will more RAM help?

I'm not doing anything particularly file-intensive most of the time (and
I've zapped most of the stuff like updatedb that thrashes disc just for the
hell of it) so I can't see why SSD would cause a direct improvement.

I also keep all my working files on a USB stick, so the SSD only holds the
OS.

(Bearing in mind that RAM is a lot cheaper than SSD)

Theo
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