[Discuss] Very slow system, no idle, but nothing running

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On 04/22/2012 12:25 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> David Kramer <david at thekramers.net>
>> The first couple of line from "top -c" read
> 
> Dude, Firefox ate your machine.  Switch to Google Chrome and you'll never go
> back.  I've excerpted some of your 'top' command below.  Comments:
> 
> * The 81.4%wa figure (and 13.3/5.0% CPU) means it's I/O bound not CPU (wa =
> waiting for disk)

Ah.  The man page on top is wholly insufficient, but I should have
learned more about those fields after all these years.

> * Mem of 50892k free plus 62024k cached (which appears on the swap line of
> output but that figure is not swap, it's the amount available for cache
> buffers) is a maxed-out situation, less than 10% of total.

OK, so the reason I haven't replied until now is because I've
implemented several remedies.

- I carved off a bit more than 5GB for additional swapspace, so now I
have about 7GB.  This is overkill, but it just worked out that way.

- I cleaned a lot of the cat hair out of my computer, so it no longer
has R25 insulation ;)  I say "a lot of" because I have determined you
cannot remove ALL cat hair from a years old laptop keyboard.  Ever.  I
also blew out the fans, etc.  That should make it run cooler.  The
keyboard sure does feel and sound different.

- Just an hour ago I took out the 2x1GB sticks and installed 2x2GB
sticks.  According to the BIOS after the system takes its tithe I have
about 3.35GB for me.  I'm sure that will make a huge difference.  I
bought for my wife's laptop (a D830, since she bought hers a year after
mine).

> * The "D" state on the firefox line says at the moment you ran 'top', firefox
> was waiting on disk.

> I knew, used, and loved Firefox for years.  But it's too bloated even for a
> 4GB machine these days, let alone a 2GB.
> * The "RES" column shows how much RAM each process is actually using at the
> moment; in this case, firefox is using 264Mb (out of a total RAM footprint of
> 1174Mb, the rest of which is swapped).

There's no arguing that Firefox isn't a bloated hulk that leaks memory
like the government leaks money.  However, there are certain pieces of
functionality that it just does much better than Chromium, either
through native functionality or because it has plugins that there's no
equivalent for in Chromium.  In general, I've been against the Google
Chrome mindset of ultra-simple interface with fewer configuration
options from the very beginning, and it frustrates me still.

For instance, Firefox allows you to group tabs into sets and switch
between sets of tabs with a hotkey.  This is really important to me
because I work on several different projects, and I could have 8-10 tabs
open per project (Agile New England related pages, Arduino related
pages, general browsing, To Do, ...).  The closest plugin for Google
Chromium is Tabs Sugar, which by all accounts is buggy as hell and
hasn't been updated in over a year.

Another feature (albeit through plugins) is one-stop-shopping streaming
video downloads.  There's lots of Google Chromium plugins for
downloading streaming videos from certain sites, but nothing that just
kinda works on most sites.

But I am giving Chromium another try.  I've installed some extensions to
make it bearable, but the lack of a way of grouping tabs and swapping
them in and out is a big problem.