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acpi package

Ubuntu 11.04 takes a long time to become available to use during boot or after going on standby

Asked by weaponx69

Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 from Ubuntu 10.10, it takes about 15 minutes for the system to become available for me to use. It doesn't take a long time to boot into Ubuntu its just that I can't use it for about 15+ minutes after it starts booting the UI. I think its because of something I have installed because I am able to boot into my wife's account at a more normal time. During this boot up time in my account, I can't do anything. I can't open windows, programs, etc. The hard drive seems fully engaged. My cursor moves but seems slow at times. The funny thing is that when its done doing this, its done and I can use my system like normal before the upgrade. It also does this if I have programs running or if I leave the computer and it goes on standby. It seems that if I have a certain amount of programs running it will hard crash and I have to do a forced shutdown through the power button. It also does this if the computer has been idle for too long. It will keep paging for nearly 20 minutes not allowing me to access the system for that whole time usually while I'm in the middle of an important project. I'm a game developer and this system memory or paging error is extremely annoying. It usually happens while I'm working on something on eclipse. I'm wondering if there is some way I could go into the system and prioritize system processes or limit how much memory process can use to keep resource hogs from stealing all the memory from my system. I have 2 gigs of system memory and a high end graphics card so this shouldn't be happening. My system shouldn't need to be paging out to the hard drive for 20 minutes.

Brian Perry

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weaponx69
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Ricardo Graça (devius) said : 		#1

How do you know it's paging and not some process doing some heavy I/O? Do you actually see swap usage in system monitor? If you have lots of disk activity and don't know the culprit, you can use iotop (doesn't come pre-installed) to see which processes are doing all that heavy I/O to your hard drive. If it is indeed something related to swap space, than you have to look in system monitor which process is eating all your ram.

Revision history for this message
weaponx69 (perry-brian) said : 		#2

My first thoughts were that it was paging and a couple times I did find
chrome taking too much memory and killed the process. On bootup
however, my system is completely locked up and I can't get anything to
run in time to check to see what the offending process is. I'm starting
to think that its some kind of resource hog on bootup because when I
boot into my wife's account, it boots up fine. I was just guessing
about paging because the hard drive is spinning the whole time I'm
locked out. I will use IOTop like you suggested to see if I can't track
the offending process.

Brian Perry

On 05/14/2011 07:30 PM, Devius wrote:
> Your question #157487 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/157487
>
> Status: Open => Needs information
>
> Devius requested more information:
> How do you know it's paging and not some process doing some heavy I/O?
> Do you actually see swap usage in system monitor? If you have lots of
> disk activity and don't know the culprit, you can use iotop (doesn't
> come pre-installed) to see which processes are doing all that heavy I/O
> to your hard drive. If it is indeed something related to swap space,
> than you have to look in system monitor which process is eating all your
> ram.
>

Revision history for this message
weaponx69 (perry-brian) said : 		#3

I figured it out. I have google desktop. I think upgrading to a new distro caused it to come on and start indexing. I found out it was it using iotop like suggested above. After I was able to run it, I saw that google desktop was doing very heavy I-O processing.