# Slow system after upgrade..?

## Knaprigt

Recently decided to upgrade some hardware and after a new install of Gentoo it now feels like I instead downgraded. I don't know what's causing the problem but it wouldn't surprise me if it had something to do with the RAM or maybe my HDDs.

Here's my current hardware specs:

CPU: Intel Core i7 980 @ 3.33GHz --- New

RAM: Corsair TR3X6G1600C9 (5 x 2GB DIMMs, had 6 but removed one that was faulty) --- New

MOBO: ASUS Sabertooth x58 (Marvell- and JMicron SATA disabled in BIOS, using Intel ICH10R SATA with HDDs as AHCI) --- New

GFX: ASUS Geforce GTX590

HDD1: Samsung HD501LJ SATA 500GB (jfs filesystem used for / and /boot, plus some swap on this one)

HDD2: Samsung HD153WI SATA 1.5TB (jfs filesystem used for /home) --- New

... also connected is a ASUS SATA DVD-drive, liquid cooling for the CPU, USB keyboard and mouse, plus I currently use the on-board audio.

The RAM is checked with Memtest86+ and shows now errors after the faulty DIMM was removed.

Since I changed CPU I decided to do a clean Gentoo install instead of using my previous installation, also the new MOBO doesn't have PATA support and my old installation was on a PATA HDD. The installation went fine and system booted as it should but the system is strangely slow. The only real performance boost I've seen compared to my old hardware setup is that compiling and installing applications is a lot faster. There does however seems to be quite some lag when starting various applications and also sometimes when scrolling. For example even the time between the login prompt and the password prompt after boot is slower than usual, starting Xorg is also slower, as is pretty much starting any applications. Starting Firefox takes quite some time, but after shutting it down and starting it again the second time is much faster, which I suppose has to do with some cache.

Here's my kernel configuration, my make.conf, my installed ebuilds and my grub.conf. The kernel parameters (noapic idle=poll clocksource=hpet pci=conf1) are there to keep my NVIDIA card stable in Xorg, but removing them doesn't seem to speed things up anyway.

I'll of course provide any information that might shed some light on this problem and any guess/help/whatever would be greatly appreciated since I'm pretty much at a loss here.  :Sad: 

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## audiodef

What jumped out at me was when you said you had six sticks of RAM but removed one. Which leaves five on-board. Your mobo is triple-channel, so perhaps it is spending extra cycles trying to access the sixth slot.

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## Knaprigt

 *audiodef wrote:*   

> What jumped out at me was when you said you had six sticks of RAM but removed one. Which leaves five on-board. Your mobo is triple-channel, so perhaps it is spending extra cycles trying to access the sixth slot.

 

Good idea, I'm gonna get the faulty DIMM replaced in a few days so I'll see if 6 DIMMs in triple-channel mode helps. I'm not that hopeful though since I don't remember any real difference from when I tested various DIMM combinations to detect the fault one, but who knows!? Might get a nice surprise.

I'll post my results here once that's don anyway!

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## Hu

In the meantime, try pulling additional sticks so that you can run a preferred configuration for that motherboard.  Based on the comment from audiodef, this would mean try running with three sticks.  The pulled sticks are not necessarily defective, but a partial configuration likely caused the motherboard to downstep the memory.

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## krinn

the noapic is certainly not a good thing to do with a multi core cpu.

You could check that easy by cat /proc/cpuinfo but your cpu should run on 1 core only because you disable apic. apic is not acpi, apic is a need for multi cpu.

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## i92guboj

If it's a new installation it could be some simple mistake.

Given that compilations feel a lot faster I assume that your kernel has support for your multicore cpu and that CFLAGS and that stuff are ok.

If your main problem has to do with loading times and GUI performance, then maybe there is something simple that you forgot, like setting up properly your video driver (dmesg and Xorg logs can be useful here), or maybe some fs issue. You could in any case use hddparm -tT to test your HDs and see if the newer one has some problem. smartctl can also be useful, and you should also check its temperature and the cpu temps, just in case.

Also, make sure that your old PSU is capable of feeding your new hardware.

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## Knaprigt

Ah, always nice with a lot of answers, so thanks for those!   :Very Happy: 

Just got the new DIMMs but sadly that doesn't seem to sort out my problems. Memtest86+ doesn't show errors anymore with all 6 DIMMs installed, but the memory seems to be setup just as dual-channel (instead of triple) even though I have all my six slots in use, but maybe that's normal reporting for Memtest86?

Anyway, I also got rid of the "noapic" kernel parameter and the system is still stable without it, but there's no real change besides that. For example /proc/cpuinfo shows multiple cores both with, and without the parameter, and the performance problem persists.

My current PSU is a 1200W so there should be enough power.

As for the graphics I've tried both stable and beta drivers from Nvidia and there's no change there either. Direct rendering is working and changing various options in my xorg.conf hasn't helped much. Also since I used the same Nvidia card with my old MOBO, RAM and CPU the problems I'm having now shouldn't be connected to the card itself. Could of course be some compatibility issue tho.

The problem seems to affect more than just Xorg since for example scrolling speed in the terminal is also slow. This had me thinking about the frame buffer but could that really explain stuff like Xorg taking long time to start? Right now it takes 20 - 25 seconds to start Xorg, which is far more than what I got before my "upgrade" and after quiting Xorg, starting it again takes only 6 seconds. For Firefox it's 8 seconds  - 2 seconds. Some cache involved here?

I'll prolly follow "i92guboj" advice and try hddparm and smartctl next, and if that doesn't help maybe just do a clean x86 install and see if that changes anything. 

Thanks again for the help tho!

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## Knaprigt

Just a little update...

Seems like it's a problem with the memory configuration after all. While reading the fine print in the manual for my mobo I noticed that while there's space for 6 DIMMs only one DIMM per channel of DDR3-1600 memory is supported. Seeing this i removed 3 of my DIMMs and now there seems to bee less "lag". For example both the starting speed of Xorg and Firefox is now cut in half. I still think there's some other minor adjustments I might have to do when it comes to scrolling speed in the terminal, etc. but at least starting applications is faster now.

Strangely enough the system reported finding all of the DIMMs (and the full 12GB of memory) when I used all of my slots, but I suppose the access to the memory was far from perfect.

Maybe I'm getting old, but it feels like buying and configuring RAM was less of a fuss in the old days ...

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## audiodef

 *Knaprigt wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Maybe I'm getting old, but it feels like buying and configuring RAM was less of a fuss in the old days ...

 

You're getting old AND it was less fuss in the old days.   :Razz: 

Seriously, though, you're right. I remember when what was important was using the correct stick type for the slot, and that was pretty much it. Now there are, like, 20 different things you have to keep in mind. SYSTEM ERR MEMORY OVERLOAD MEMORY DUMP FE00A16BC490AF34E897DD77EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

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