My box got slow, what should be my first steps?

[Jan]

Hello,

with every upgrade from B1 my system got a little more stable, but also quite a bit slower (overall). Recently the system also freezes quite often and I have to wait a few minutes for it to handle the queued inputs from my remote (then suddenly quickly, which is always a source of amusement by itself, or even better with a few minutes to pass between individual queue items). Sometimes both during playback and during xbmc handling xbms drops back to the shell. Often the box does not respond anymore via ssh and I have to pull the plug.
Usually things get better, after it ran a while (start of video playback is faster), but gets worse once the box has had nothing to do for a while.

I have transmission service running in the backgrou[/size]nd but no active torrents during playback. It did not seem to make things a lot better whe I stopped the service.

I would want to try some basic steps such as reinstalling xbmc (I have the impression this is more xbmc related than to raspian). Is there some place where I could read up such standard procedures?

I've got a 256MB Model B, RC2, running from an external hd, connected via wifi.

dmesg http://pastebin.com/Zi4JtYKq
top http://pastebin.com/2xx9LmWx
vstat http://pastebin.com/CRfeAGAt

[IriDium]

I have a 256Mb RPi running RC2 and I don't notice any problems.

MP4 video is around 30% CPU
AVI video is about the same.
MKV video is about 40% CPU.

68% does seem a bit hight for your machine.

Can you post /boot/config.txt and /boot/cmdline.txt

What XBMC skin are you using? If not confluence - try that, and see if things improve.

What Addons do you have installed? Try disabling all of them and see if that makes a difference. If it does, enable them one by one and see which one causes a change.

Also, is you WIFI dongle externally powered?

What I would do is install nmon and use that to monitor what is going on. See what happens to the CPU when you stop transmission and then when it is restarted.

Keep a check on dmesg especially after an "event" to see if anything new appears.

Also tail xbmc.log to see if anything shows up there - tail -f -n 10 /home/xbian/temp/xbmc.log

[Jan]

Thanks for the fast reply, Iridium!

config.txt

Terminal

initramfs initramfs.gz 0x00a00000
gpu_mem_512=128
gpu_mem_256=100
initial_turbo=1
disable_splash=1
arm_freq=840
core_freq=275
sdram_freq=400
over_voltage=0
decode_MPG2=0xb14c46db
decode_WVC1=0xcf88b2b9
emmc_pll_core=0

and /b/cmdline.txt

Terminal

telnet zswap.enabled=1 zswap.compressor=lz4 sdhci-bcm2708.sync_after_dma=0 dwc_otg. lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=LABEL=xbian-copy rootflags=subvol=root/@,thread_pool=2, autodefrag,compress=lzo,commit=120 rootfstype=btrfs rootwait smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N elevator=cfq logo.nologo quiet noswap loglevel=0 mod_scsi.scan=sync partswap startevent=mountall splash nohdparm --startup-event mountall

I use Quarz skin which does not install any additional plugins and was snappier than confluence in the past - but I will try. Also I installed some addins (youtube, etc...) - I will see if something improves, if I remove them.
Also I use profiles - is there something to take care here?

I'll have a look on the other tips!

Thanks, again,
J

[IriDium]

Never used profiles, so it's an area to look at.

Also, is your WIFI dongle externally powered? I know that a WIFI can use a lot of amps, so it might be an issue.

[Jan]

(1st May, 2014 03:04 AM)IriDium Wrote:  Also, is your WIFI dongle externally powered? I know that a WIFI can use a lot of amps, so it might be an issue.

It's internally powered, but I use it for quite a while now and in the past, at least, this has not been an issue.

[Jan]

I uninstalled a few plugins I did not use and now it's back to normal...

Sorry for the fuzz, could have guessed this on my own...

Thanks anyway!

J