I am having some issues with performance with ubuntu server installed on a
toshiba laptop that is about 10 years old. specs: pentium iii, 1.00 GHz,
380 GB ram. The OS is slow and fairly unresponsive (more so than WinXP),
and seems to heat up pretty rapidly. If I look at "top", it shows that
about 5-10 % cpu is being used by user, and ~20% by system, when nothing
else is running. But if I add all of the values up, it is much less than
that.
Exapmle top:
top - 16:39:50 up 35 min, 2 users, load average: 0.60, 0.56, 0.48
Tasks: 87 total, 3 running, 84 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.0%us, 18.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 64.5%id, 11.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si,
0.0%st
Mem: 377252k total, 261812k used, 115440k free, 9956k buffers
Swap: 714884k total, 0k used, 714884k free, 126412k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+
COMMAND
3708 root 15 -5 0 0 0 R *6.3* 0.0 1:50.60
ntos_wq
4588 root 20 0 31580 15m 8292 S * 5.6 * 4.2 0:46.61
Xorg
4811 cbeck 20 0 28424 16m 9988 S 0.7 4.4 0:11.97
sensors-applet
4548 root 20 0 3300 1040 912 S 0.3 0.3 0:00.35
hald-addon-stor
4937 cbeck 20 0 37300 13m 9568 R 0.3 3.8 0:01.87
gnome-terminal
5066 cbeck 20 0 9476 2584 2028 S 0.3 0.7 0:00.74
conky
5072 cbeck 20 0 2304 1092 856 R 0.3 0.3 0:00.58
top
1 root 20 0 2844 1696 548 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.27
init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01
kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00
migration/0
4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01
ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00
watchdog/0
6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04
events/0
7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03
khelper
41 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00
kblockd/0
44 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.07
kacpid
45 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 kacpi_notify
I know the formating is probably going to get lost, but if you add up the
cpu usage from the display, it comes out to 13.8%, wheras the sum of usr
and sys is 25.3%. And the 25.3 % is roughly the same as conky reports when
I open it up. Where is the extra cpu usage comming from? And just running
two tabs in firefox as I write this, firefox is bouncing back and forth
between 60% and 7% cpu usage. Any ideas?