Author Topic: ArcaOS Sluggishness  (Read 40404 times)

christech

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ArcaOS Sluggishness
« on: October 10, 2023, 07:08:28 pm »
Hey all,

My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc.

Machine is a Dell Precision T3610:

4 Core XEON E5-1603 @ 2.80 Ghz
4 GB RAM
500GB 7200 RPM Mechanical Drive in AHCI mode

I turned off all Virtualization in BIOS.

I don't know what to look for, or where to start. Any help is appreciated.


« Last Edit: October 10, 2023, 07:32:43 pm by christech »

Dave Yeo

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2023, 07:41:16 pm »
CPU overheating, due to dirt/bad fan/thermal paste going bad? HD dying?

Pete

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #2 on: October 10, 2023, 09:44:24 pm »
Hi

Like Dave I suggest checking for "dust bunnies" in cpu fan as a likely cause.

Another possibility which has caught me out in the past is PSU starting to fail - usually due to overheating/dust buildup.

On the software side it could be worth running cleanini - http://www.os2site.com/sw/util/ini/cleanini55.zip - followed by checkini, part of WPTools, as sometimes sluggish behaviour can be INI file related.
Still worth checking dust buildup inside case and PSU though...

Regards

Pete

christech

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #3 on: October 10, 2023, 11:31:45 pm »
It's clean in there. I cleaned it out 3 months ago. I did a full diagnostic from the built-in Dell diagnostics. All tests passed on thorough mode.. took a few hours.  The mechanical drive is new.

I will check out the INI file cleaner. One idea I thought about was to get a small SSD and install the ArcaOS UEFI version to the SSD and move my system files over to the SSD and use the 500GB as a storage drive.

Pete

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #4 on: October 11, 2023, 12:58:35 am »
Hi christech

I moved Windows7, 3 ArcaOS versions (boot drives) and my OS/2 Apps drives from a 1Tb "spinner" to SSD and found systems boot a little quicker and apps load faster.

OTOH: My new system has an NVMe drive and that is much faster than SSD  :-)


Regards

Pete

Roderick Klein

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #5 on: October 11, 2023, 01:35:03 am »
Hey all,

My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc.

Machine is a Dell Precision T3610:

4 Core XEON E5-1603 @ 2.80 Ghz
4 GB RAM
500GB 7200 RPM Mechanical Drive in AHCI mode

I turned off all Virtualization in BIOS.

I don't know what to look for, or where to start. Any help is appreciated.

This sudden issue indeed sounds like a hard drive ready to kick the can!
You do not need to turn off virtualisation. If your BIOS has a setting for hyperthreading turn that off.
But again the fact  it starts to get sluggish all of a sudden is bad sign,,,


Roderick

Dave Yeo

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #6 on: October 11, 2023, 01:39:33 am »
It's clean in there. I cleaned it out 3 months ago. I did a full diagnostic from the built-in Dell diagnostics. All tests passed on thorough mode.. took a few hours.  The mechanical drive is new.

While in the BIOS, did you look at the page that shows CPU temperature and fan speed?
Mechanical drives fail really quick or after a long time, so you never know with a new drive until you've used it for a while, and SMART doesn't catch everything. The SSD is a good idea regardless whether your drive is failing or not.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #7 on: October 12, 2023, 04:01:57 am »
...My ArcaOS 5.1 machine has started to get sluggish. Not sure what I can check. For example, opening Drives takes 10 seconds to show the drives, Firefox takes 30 seconds to open.. etc...

So how does that actually compare to the performance you saw BEFORE the issue started?

Are we talking a Day & Night kind of a difference, or is it that it "feels" like something's off?

Check Hobbes for a little util called 'cpuspeed', that'll show you the CPU core frequency in a CLI window, that way if the heat is an issue and your BIOS is throttling things back you should be able to tell.

In my case, I've got my Phenom II X6 set to 3850 MHz in BIOS and running at 3850 MHz while my OS/2 box is up and running.

christech

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #8 on: October 13, 2023, 05:31:43 am »
It used to be snappier when opening folders.. Firefox has always been slow to load. Native apps load a lot quicker like Lotus SmartSuite and Describe, HyperAccess etc.

Question for you all.. I was reading that it might be better to have a 2 GB HPFS primary partition for the OS, and another JFS partition for Apps and another JFS partition for data. Any truth to this? If I'm going to re-do it, I want to do it right, rather than the easy one big JFS partition for the install.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #9 on: October 13, 2023, 05:39:14 am »
I happen to have two ArcaOS 5.1 partitions booting under UEFI on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900. One has a 2 GB HPFS ArcaOS boot drive and a 10 GB JFS Programs, Home and Unixroot drive.

The HPFS drive boots in 24.4 seconds, while the JFS drive boots in 25.2 seconds. You will need a stopwatch to see the difference.
Expert consulting for ArcaOS, OS/2 and eComStation
http://www.blondeguy.com

Dave Yeo

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #10 on: October 13, 2023, 05:48:26 am »
While I never timed it, it seemed to me that having an HPFS boot partition was slower, and of course, if chkdsk runs, it is much slower.
Splitting up the stuff into multiple partitions is a good idea.
For Firefox, did you run ffturbo_install? If not, might help with loading speed and it will mark the DLLs to use high memory.

Andi B.

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #11 on: October 13, 2023, 12:27:43 pm »
I gave up using HPFS(386) years ago. Reasons -
- long chkdsk times
- no >2GB files possible
- shared memory used by HPFS(386) can be used for better purposes

I see no advantage in using HPFS(386) anymore.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #12 on: October 13, 2023, 03:19:28 pm »
I found this page that discusses HPFS, JFS and ArcaOS disk layout.

https://88watts.net/disklayout.html
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christech

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #13 on: October 13, 2023, 06:11:45 pm »
Yeah that's the article I found. I'm going to get a 500GB SSD and slice it up into three partitions.

Doug Clark

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Re: ArcaOS Sluggishness
« Reply #14 on: October 14, 2023, 07:31:00 am »
Chris,

I am not sure of your situation.  It is a upgrade of an existing system to AOS  ver 5.1 and has become slow after the upgrade to v 5.1?  Or have you been running AOS 5.1 for awhile and it has become slower and slower?

As for filesystems, drives, and speed: my experience is JFS is much faster in chkdsk than HPFS.  SSDs are MUCH faster than spinning  drives on chkdsk and any kind of directory access - like opening a folder - even if both the spinning drive and SSD have the same sustained transfer rate.  Spinning drives also have the obvious problem of fragmentation over time.

If you have upgraded AOS and are accessing network drives, and the slow down occurred after the upgrade, could the NIC driver have changed?  I have had speed issues using the  multimac driver for the network adapter built into my motherboard, which I solved by installing a Intel pro 1000 NIC and using the Intel driver.  Don't know if it was multimac, my particular network adapter/motherboard combo or something else in my system.  But opening a file dialog box (FOC) was painful because of the slow access to networked drives.

My recommendation: boot drive/partition on an SSD,  swap file and firefox profile and TEMP directory on a spinning drive because of SSD wear and potential slow down.  Or if you have enough RAM, use a RAM disk for the TEMP directory.   If you are using the AOS RAM disk, format the RAM drive HPFS (unless that has been fixed.)
Use/add an SSD even if you are running SATA 2 or slower bus on your motherboard.