[PlanetCCRMA] Re: fedora machine load

[Peter Lutek]

plutek@infinity.net wrote:

> Fernando Lopez-Lezcano writes:
>
>> On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 09:00, Peter Lutek wrote:
>>
>>> greetings!
>>> a while ago, i switched from ccrma/fc2 to gentoo on my laptop, 
>>> because of  the richer available repository of non-audio packages, 
>>> and also the  ability to better customize the environment to a given 
>>> set of hardware. i  am currently considering re-examining ccrma (on 
>>> fc3), because i want to  spend more time making music, and less time 
>>> doing sys admin.
>>> i still have my ccrma/fc2 hard drive, and have recently compared it 
>>> to my  gentoo install, which is on a separate drive. here are some 
>>> observations  (both with nothing running except the ion3 window 
>>> manager and top):
>>> ccrma/fc2: 62 processes, 218 Mb RAM used
>>> gentoo: 40 processes, 54 Mb RAM used
>>> yes, i realize this is a simplistic comparison, but i have to think 
>>> twice  about moving back to a system which uses almost 1/4 of my 
>>> available RAM  when it is IDLE (i have 1Gb RAM in this machine).
>>> so, questions:
>>> is fc3 better in this respect than fc2?
>>
>>
>> Number of processes running after a stock install? I don't know,
>> probably not that different. The numbers 62 and 40 don't say much about
>> what is going on on both machines. A list of _which_ processes are
>> running on both would be a better start. Most probably a lot of the
>> processes and services in the fedora machine can be stopped safely, it
>> all depends on what you need (and this is something you would do once,
>> of course). 
>
well... i've stopped a bunch of services, and the idle memory usage is a 
little better, but still not what it was with gentoo.

interestingly, though, i'm getting better audio performance in a simple 
18-track ardour recording test than i was in gentoo. jack frames and 
buffers are at 64 and 2, and i'm getting NO xruns, even when starting 
and stopping other applications, resizing windows, etc. -- on my gentoo 
system, i could only barely run at 64/2 and would at least get xruns 
when starting and stopping ardour. furthermore, with this Planet setup, 
i'm doing it all as user rather than as root. now that is COOL!

and the install/tweak/etc. was done in a day. like i said before, more 
music time is what i want.

a BIG thankyou to fernando!

now, there is one remaining curiosity, which perhaps someone can help me 
sort out: my average load NEVER gets below 1.0, even with no 
applications running, and it is not solved by a reboot. the machine does 
not behave like a 1.0-loaded machine, so there's something strange going 
on here. i've read some references to processes in a D state causing 
this sort of thing, but there don't appear to be any of those, so i'm at 
a loss. any clues?

glad to be back on the Planet....
-p