Hi everyone!
My daily driver is a Surface Go 1 running Fedora with 8GB of ram and 128GB of storage. It is always hooked up to a Philips 273B screen via USB-C.
Most of the time, it is really fast and a perfect tiny Linux and Gnome machine easily hookable to a big screen for when you’re not travelling.
However, sometimes, after installing updates but maybe not always, it is slow as hell. Sometimes, detaching the Surface from the big screen and hooking it again, solves the issue, but not always. It is a behavior I already had when I was using Ubuntu and I’ve had on Fedora since version 36.
Here are some useful printscreens from HTOP and the ressource management system:
#high cpu usage
#low cpu usage
I thought that maybe installing the Surface kernel would stop the issue, but it didn’t…
Sometimes it’s annoying enough to make me just want to use my wife’s MacBook Pro 2012 running Fedora as a daily driver but the form factor is less practical.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Edit: it happens on startup, even after days of inactivity
I have had this with some laptops if the charger is faulty. The laptop goes into a limp mode, where the CPU locks to its lowest clock speed.
Since the display is using USB-C it may be triggering the slowness. Some USB-C monitors also deliver power to the connected device.
Is the laptop slow, even when running off battery, or only when running off battery?
Keeping an eye on the CPU frequency with something like Btop can maybe help troubleshoot the issue.
I will share an issue I and others have with their laptop that presents just a bit differently (a single cpu pegged at 100% instead of all of them).
If i wake my laptop from sleep while it is plugged into an external monitor, I will have a single cpu pegged at 100% trying to handle endless acpi interrupts. I have to hibernate my machine and turn it back on to fix it. Alternatively I can unplug the monitor before waking from sleep to prevent it from happening. I just hibernate instead of sleeping now.
It’s all just speculations, both what you suggested and what others said.
You are on the right path with your screenshots but you might not be measuring the right thing.
So, you need a (paper) notebook to record objectively (not your biased feeling assuming a pattern that might not exist) when it happens and for how long. Only from then can you backtrack to WHAT causes it. Sure you can have some hypothesis (update related, screen attach/detach, BIOS, RAM, etc) but that should NOT lead to your data acquisition.
So you htop is nice but AFAICT it’s just about CPU and memory, it’s not about e.g. IO so consider instead
iotop, in particular if one process is some indexing (e.g. locatedb). Theoretically if it’s not CPU/memory (which you are saying it’s not the case) then it basically just leaves IO, that can be again indexing, some heavy process that is bottlenecked on disk access, but can also be a bug, e.g. BT pairing/unpairing that happens faster than you can notice.Think of this as a fun investigation that leads you to better understanding of your setup, good luck.
Yeah I guess you’re right, my last chance of solving the problem could be by creating a spreadsheet with as much data as possible on every occurrence…
I don’t think it would be a thrilling investigation though😅
What are IO and Iotop?
What are IO and Iotop?
Input / Output.
Reading and writing to disk, network, etc.
iotopshows will show applications writing and reading from disk. It’s going to likely be pretty sporadic.What may be happening, and what others are suggesting, is that you’re running out of memory (8gig isn’t that much these days). When that happens the system starts writing memory to disk so it can free more. That’s what you see with the “swap” usage. You can see a bit more about your memory usage with
free -m:$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 64141 17077 24020 1981 30419 47063 Swap: 20479 0 20479Using swap space isn’t necessarily bad. But reading/writing to it frequently can be a performance killer. You can monitor that with a command called
vmstat:$ vmstat -w 3 --procs-- -----------------------memory---------------------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----------cpu---------- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st gu 1 0 0 24590136 70748 31066604 0 0 228 309 9959 18 8 1 91 0 0 0 0 0 0 24595172 70748 31065076 0 0 0 119 3159 6677 2 1 98 0 0 0 2 0 0 24607436 70748 31070316 0 0 2300 75 3147 6693 2 1 97 0 0 0 0 0 0 24594892 70748 31070316 0 0 0 584 3417 5950 1 1 98 0 0 0The columns to pay attention to there are under the
---swap--header.siis “Swap In” andsois "Swap Out. Those are reads/writes to and from swap space. Seeing a little activity there is fine. It is typically pretty spikey. But if you’re seeing lots of numbers there then it could just indicate that you’re running low on memory and the OS needs to move things to and from disk frequently. While it’s moving things to and from the disk the application trying to use that memory has to wait.
Can you do screenshots with btop? Would be nice to see if the cpus are being throttled for temperature. I believe btop shows frequency and temp by default.
I’ve never heard of btop but I can look at it👍
But wouldn’t it be weird for it to be temperature related when the computer was just started and unplugging/plugging the external screen solve the issue? This would make think it’s display related no?
Yes it would be weird, but it would still show throttling.
This looks like a hardware issue.
I’d guess at overheating, or an error with the CPU’s energy management.
First thing I’d do is look if there’s a BIOS update available.
Then install lm-sensors (there’s also a GUI frontend called psensor and a gnome shell extension) to show CPU temperature, and check if they’re too high. If they aren’t, you could set your CPU to always use max power and see if that fixes it, but it will reduce battery life.
Or try a different distro from a live USB and see if that makes a difference.Can you check the cpu frequency? Maybe it’s in a sort of low power mode with low frequencies when it’s slow.
This is my thought too. Your screenshots don’t show cpu freq. Everything can appear normal on other measures but if your cpu has throttled right back it’ll run slow with no obvious cause. I have seen this on certain laptops when external peripherals are added/removed after waking from sleep. Sometimes forcing sleep/wake or a reboot will fix.
Use
lscpuat the cmdline or better yet install gnome extension ‘system monitor next’ and put the cpu freq graph in your top bar to watch it in realtime.https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3010/system-monitor-next/
Disable any file indexing service and/or repositories update that may be running on the background
I’d run some checks in BIOS. Something is either overheating or about to die
Apparently the BIOS is up to date even if my knowledge about these is quite limited…
About something dying in the computer, it would be surprising as it has been like this for the last 4 years and only happens maybe once a month after starting…
Heat? Could be overheating and throttling?
I guess I should have said it before, but it happens when starting the computer, sometimes a week after an update, so I don’t think it’s heat related. Especially because it sometimes solves itself after unplugging/plugging the external monitor through USB-C.
Ah, I thought the timeline between the events and the slowdown were a lot closer, and that unplugging the monitor just gave it enough time to cool down.
The monitor part is definitely odd, is it a particularly high res/Hz monitor?
Otherwise I’m also leaning towards excessive swapping being the culprit, but that doesn’t explain the monitor part.
Apart from what others said about power/throttling, I wonder if the filled up memory during the upgrade (or other memory-heavy use) pushes some central pages to swap and then they stay there after?
After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again you can force back everything to RAM by temporarily disabling swap:
swapoff $swapdev && swapon $swapdevTo list swap devices, just run
swapon.Also switching to an X11 window manager can be quite a lot snappier than modern GNOME for older hardware. You could try Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, or KDE with the X session.
If it’s not throttling/thernals, I wouldn’t be surprised if those two together is what made things worse after migrating dist.
If you’ve been swapping heavily over time you might also want to check disk health with
smartctland check that you don’t have related errors indmesg.If you press tab in htop you can also see if there is high IO load going on.
Don’t run swapoff if everything in swap may not fit in RAM.
Hence:
After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again
If it’s like the last htop image should be no problem.
Turning off swap could make things much worse though. The system will have less memory for file caches.
I’d leave swap alone, just monitor for whether the system is paging frequently. “vmstat 3” should show if you’re writing to swap frequently.
Turning off swap could make things much worse though
How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)
Anecdotally, this maneuver can help tremendously tonrecover responsiveness in some cases. I guess the overall sitiation could be improved by tweaking
vm.swappiness.How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)
$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 64141 17213 24010 1984 30297 46927 Swap: 20479 0 20479See that
buff/cachecolumn? That’s memory being used by the system for caching. Files you you open and access get cached into memory as do inodes, filesystem objects, etc. If you run a “find / -type f” twice in a row the second one will be significantly faster because the first run cached a lot of objects into memory.By starving the system of memory all that will be flushed and you get more disk access doing things you’re actually trying to do. Whereas things sitting in swap are there because they aren’t currently needed.
By turning off swap and then back on again you’re just forcing the system to drop all that cache which it will then attempt to reclaim space for and push things back out to swap.
I don’t know what benefit you think you’ll gain in the process.
I am not sure how this works, but have you played around with the power settings? Tried to set it to high performance?