Slow bootup and slow system on Asus P4P800-E Deluxe with 3.4Ghz P4-HT

[viper_one]

Hoping for some help here with my problem since I have been unable to figure it out myself. I have a fresh install of FC6 on an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard with an Intel P4-HT 3.4Ghz processor that has only been updated after installing the livna nvidia drivers to get into init5. The problem is when I boot it up it takes awhile (10-15min) to get fully booted up, then when it is booted up the cpu load is high when the system is at idle and it runs very slow. This system runs fine in windows, I have tried knoppix and ubuntu (both live CD's) on it and they start up, however they ran slow as well and still take some time to boot up. I have set FC6 up on 3 other computers with no problems and have also set up FC5 and FC3 a few times, they were all with different motherboards though. I have searched around on ubuntuforums.org and linuxquestions.org as well as on here and have tried all the suggestions I could find on the posts found on them but nothing has seemed to work. Hopefully someone can help, I would like to get this system running FC6 with the performance it should have since my other computers are running FC6 problem free and my 996Mhz one is running better than this one. Thanks in advance, specs are below and I can get any other info as needed.


System Hardware:
-Asus P4P800-E Deluxe
-Intel P4-HT 3.4Ghz
-4096Mb PC3200 SDRAM
-Nvidia 512Mb 6800XT AGP
-40Gb IDE Hard Drive
-160Gb IDE Hard Drive
-NEC DVD-RW
-NEC CD-RW


BIOS Settings:
-Bios Version: 1009 (Newest)
-IDE Chipset Configuration: 'Compatibility Mode' PATA Only
-ACPI 2.0: Enabled
-ACPI APIC Support: Enabled
-BIOS-->AML ACPI Table: Enabled


Have tried different combinations of: noapic, acpi=off, noht, nosmp, maxcpu=0, irqpoll


links to the suggestions I have tried:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...4p800-e+deluxe
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...=499811&page=3
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ghlight=p4p800
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...4p800-e+deluxe

[Daniel_at]

Hi - seems i have a similar problem...

I have also a P4P800 with an P4@3Ghz, 2Gb Ram - Bootuptime is with Ubuntu Feisty really okay (~40sec), but with many LiveCDs i got problems while booting. Including Knoppix, Mandrive and FC7beta (which i have testet sofar). All lead to an "ata1: timeout...." which gets repeated somehow often.

Feisty boots okay, but Harddisk performance is much worser than under WinXP on the same machine. I have a question thread (unanswared sofar) in ubuntuforums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=423214 (detailed description of my system, logs and configurations i have tried)

I tried to disable the onboard Promise SATA Controller in the BIOS - Bootup problems disappered - but performance was also bad (and i need 4 SATA ports).

Did you find any further improvements? Or any way to get at least track of the bottleneck, causing this behaviour?

TIA Daniel

[viper_one]

I haven't made much progress on what the bottleneck is. I installed Ubuntu, I think it was edgy, on the computer to see if an installed version would work any better than the liveCD but there was no difference. So pretty much I'm still searching around for a solution as well. I haven't tried ubuntu fiesty yet, but might give it a try to see if it makes any difference. Mostly right now I'm waiting for the final release of Fedora Core 7 to give it a try.

Looking at your post on Ubuntuforums.org it sounds as though your cpu usage goes up to 100% only when accessing the hard drive, is this correct? or is your cpu usage always high such as at idle after it boots up?

Also have you tried setting your ICH5 Bios setting to "compatible" instead of "enhanced" and reinstalling ubuntu completely? I've read this is one fix to the slow performance with this motherboard in linux, however it did not work for me.

If there is anymore info I can provide or any suggestions of what to try, let me know.

-Matt

[Daniel_at]

Hello...

Looking at your post on Ubuntuforums.org it sounds as though your cpu usage goes up to 100% only when accessing the hard drive, is this correct? or is your cpu usage always high such as at idle after it boots up?

No - cpu usage is quite okay, if the system idles. But if i have disk IO on my drives (have only SATA drives regulary... but also tested it with an IDE drive: same) CPU rocks up to 100% and system is very creepy - MP3 stotters, or other disk-operations totally block.

I can work with the system - more or less - okay, have mostly a WinXP running in an VMware and other big applications in parralell - there is no problem with CPU power - as long i keep disc IO low

Also have you tried setting your ICH5 Bios setting to "compatible" instead of "enhanced" and reinstalling ubuntu completely? I've read this is one fix to the slow performance with this motherboard in linux, however it did not work for me.

Will try it as soon as iam on that machine again!

In between I was a bit googling:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=109244969822413&w=2

Maybe it has something to do with this bug - but i have tried to limit my memory to 700Megs (mem=700M) but Disc Perfomance didnt improve noticeable... will try to build a new kernel without highmem - just for testing.

I also read, it may have something to do with the "AGP-Aperature-Size" Option in the kernel... Maybe youll try to set it to 1Meg or 32Meg - in my case: didnt change anything

sofar...
Daniel

[Daniel_at]

Okay... maybe, mem=700 (this means HighMem isnt used) helped a bit - access to many different files is somewhat faster. If i open a folder in DigiKam, all the thumnails now get loaded very fast. Much faster than with HighMem used.

But overall responsevines isnt what I expect from a hardware i have here.

ciao, Daniel

[viper_one]

I'm going to do a fresh install of Fedora Core 6 tonight to get rid of any changes I already made to the current install and will give the mem=700 a try along with the "AGP-Aperature-Size" option. I'll post my results after I give them a try, maybe the HighMem being used might be part of the problem.

-Matt

[lmo]

Show:
/var/log/dmesg
grep Drive /var/log/messages

[viper_one]

Show:
/var/log/dmesg
grep Drive /var/log/messages

Will post those as well once I get it reinstalled, it has currently been sitting with Fedora uninstalled for the last few weeks since the install and removal of ubuntu. I did check through them and didn't notice anything obvious but it doesn't help to have someone else look through them as well.

[viper_one]

Results from grep Drive /var/log/messages and dmesg. dmesg was a bit long so it is attached

[root@localhost ~]# grep Drive /var/log/messages
May  5 06:23:59 localhost kernel: apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16ac)
May  5 06:23:59 localhost kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.12ac
May  5 11:17:50 localhost kernel: apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16ac)
May  5 11:17:50 localhost kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.12ac
May  5 11:17:50 localhost kernel: iTCO_wdt: Intel TCO WatchDog Timer Driver v1.01 (11-Nov-2006)
May  5 11:17:50 localhost kernel: sonypi: Sony Programmable I/O Controller Driver v1.26.

[lmo]

You listed 2 IDE drives in you first post 40/160 but no mention of scsi.
What is the scsi business in dmesg? Is that some usb drive you didn't list? Can it be a slowdown?

I doubt if memory is a problem unless you have a bad memory card in there.
896MB LOWMEM available is a normal message in my system with 1.5GB memory.

You also didn't list PDC20269. What is that?
It has hde: _NEC DV-5700A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive attached.

I had problems with DVD on a PDC20268 (Promise Ultra100tx2) and changed the DVD to the MB controller. Haldaemon had fits with mine, but grep Drive messages shows no problems on yours.

[viper_one]

I'm pretty sure the scsi in the dmesg is my external usb drive, it is usually not plugged into this computer so I doubt it is the problem but I will disconnect it for now to make sure. Same with the memory problem, I doubt there is a bad memory card in there because they all pass memtest.

I did forget to mention the PDC20269, I assume this is my Promise Ultra133tx2 since I do have one in there. However I just removed it to make sure it wasn't the problem and it didn't seem to make a difference.

One other thing I have noticed is that with the boot up time a lot of the time seems to be sitting after "starting udev:" shows up then after a bit of waiting(~5min) it times out and says it will continue in the background also showing it as failed. Not sure if that helps narrow down the problem, but just something I noticed the last few times of starting it up today.

[lmo]

after "starting udev:" shows up then after a bit of waiting(~5min) it times out

That makes me think about sendmail. Sendmail will be very slow starting if the hosts et. al. files are inaccurate and send everything going around in circles until they time out.

Would the startup go faster if you did:
/sbin/chkconfig sendmail off

Later, if desired, you can turn it back on with:
/sbin/chkconfig sendmail on

If doing that makes it startup faster, then the hosts et. al. files are incorrect.

What says:
top -n 5

[viper_one]

"/sbin/chkconfig sendmail off" did not seem to make a difference in the boot up time and "starting udev:" still times out and fails. Any other ideas as to what could cause it to time out or fail?

output of "top -n5"

[root@localhost ~]# top -n 5
top - 09:20:20 up 49 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.28, 0.66, 1.13
Tasks: 126 total,   2 running, 123 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 10.8%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 88.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   3108168k total,   583972k used,  2524196k free,    20732k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   394204k cached
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 3695 root      15   0 48160  25m 6836 S    9  0.8  10:03.20 Xorg               
 9365 root      16   0  2164 1084  820 R    6  0.0   0:01.15 top                
 8118 root      15   0 40112  13m 9156 S    5  0.4   0:25.96 gnome-terminal     
 2692 root      18   0 33180 1388  600 S    1  0.0   0:25.40 pcscd              
 7252 root      15   0 16056 4400 3444 S    0  0.1   0:07.35 gnome-screensav    
    1 root      15   0  2036  676  580 S    0  0.0   0:02.34 init               
    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0        
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0        
    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0         
    5 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1        
    6 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1        
    7 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/1         
    8 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 events/0           
    9 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 events/1           
   10 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper            
   11 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread            
   61 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kblockd/0

Top shows a lower cpu usage than I remember in my original post but I think I was using the system monitor when I was making that post and it might have been part of why the cpu usage was so high. Overall though, whenever i try to do anything the responsiveness of the computer really slows down. Even just a right click on the screen takes a couple seconds for the menu to show up compared to less than a second on my laptop which has a slower cpu.

[lmo]

What if you run:
top

Then watch top while you move the mouse around, click, click on menu.
Does that make xorg go 100%

[viper_one]

looks as though nautilus is what goes up in cpu usage, it goes up to about 15% just moving the mouse around then about 50% when clicking and moving over the menu. xorg is listed second and stays about 6-10%. then top is third at about 7%