CentOS 5.5 terrible slow

[emiliounix]

I recently installed CentOS 5.5 on a new box (Intel i3, 8gb RAM) to research virtualization and I'm having terrible performance when opening applications.
Takes 21 seconds to open terminal and gedit, and 23 seconds to open firefox. The CPU and utilization is very low at all time. These delays also occur when I log in graphically. It takes several seconds to authenticate and minutes to load gnome.
The SATA disk throughput is OK since takes 5 seconds to copy 600MB from a NTFS partition to an ext3 partition.
I have several virtual machines using KVM with LVM partitions. For example, in a Ubuntu 10.04 guest takes less than a second to load terminal, gedit and firefox!!!

I was thinking that there can be some DMA problem, or a disk latency problem. But recently I discover that in some point the memory consumption grew up to +4GB! (the box has 8gb RAM)
When I install CentOS, the system has 4GB RAM and later I added 4GB extra. I think that was the moment when this issue started.

I let some info, I hope it helps. And I hope someone can give me some hint to find the problem.

Thank you in advance.

# uname -a

Linux xxx 2.6.18-194.el5 #1 SMP Fri Apr 2 14:58:14 EDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7877        836       7041          0         29        514
-/+ buffers/cache:        292       7585
Swap:         4094          0       4094

# top

top - 12:41:42 up 34 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.11, 0.09
Tasks: 161 total,   1 running, 160 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.1%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.9%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8066832k total,   874880k used,  7191952k free,    32128k buffers
Swap:  4192924k total,        0k used,  4192924k free,   527904k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 3544 root      15   0  360m  12m 7648 S  0.3  0.2   1:01.03 Xorg               
    1 root      15   0 10352  700  588 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.52 init               
    2 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0        
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0        
    4 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0         
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1        
    6 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1        
    7 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/1         
    8 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/2        
    9 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/2        
   10 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/2         
   11 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/3        
   12 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/3        
   13 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/3         
   14 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 events/0           
   15 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 events/1           
   16 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 events/2

[dE_logics]

KVM is not good. Try Virtualbox.

[user-f11]

Try with Fedora 13. Download from the net a Live CD image.
Write in Google: Fedora-13-i686-Live.iso

This Centos 5.5 has no i686 compilation.
Put a GPU to the motherboard to see the difference.

[dE_logics]

WHAT? These problems are NOT in visualized environment? I heard centOS does give a lot of problems.

Then I would suggest Debian... it has a large package repository, and rarely you need to hunt for them.

And not to mention.. very good QA. Yeah, but the package manager has issues which you will mind if you're an advanced user.

For source based distros (the best of the lot IMO), we have just one...

[Lazydog]

# uname -a

Linux xxx 2.6.18-194.el5 #1 SMP Fri Apr 2 14:58:14 EDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

How about updating the system? This is an old kernel.
Here is the latest CentOS kernel;

Linux com 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jan 5 17:52:25 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

How many processors do you have?
Is the VM running when you are having issues?
How many CPU's are the VM(s) configured to use?

KVM is not good. Try Virtualbox.

I guess that all depends. I run it without issues.

[user-f11]

How about updating the system? This is an old kernel.
Here is the latest CentOS kernel;

Linux com 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jan 5 17:52:25 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

How many processors do you have?
Is the VM running when you are having issues?
How many CPU's are the VM(s) configured to use?



I guess that all depends. I run it without issues.

Isn't that x86_64 a compilation for AMD processors. As far as I can see here the processor is Intel Core i3.

[Rubberman]

I have been running, until recently, CentOS 5 on an Intel box (dual E5450 3GHz quad-core processors, 8GB RAM) that I use as a virtualization host without any problems. I run Solaris x86, Windows XP, QNX, other varieties of Linux (including Scientific Linux 6 and Ubuntu 10.10), and such. The virtual machine manager I use is Oracle's VirtualBox. Performance seems quite snappy to me.

I recently switched over to Scientific Linux 6 (clone of RHEL 6) and am still using VirtualBox without noticing any degradation in performance. In general, it seems a bit snappier, though I am as yet running VBox 3.2.12 and not 4.0.

FWIW, the latest CentOS 5.5 kernel seems to be 2.6.18-194.26.1, at least for CentOS Plus, which is usually about 1 release behind the baseline. Anyway, I just went to one of the mirror sites, and yes 2.6.18-194.32.1 is the latest kernel release.

[Lazydog]

Isn't that x86_64 a compilation for AMD processors. As far as I can see here the processor is Intel Core i3.

AH... no. I'm running an Intel i7 here which that was taken from.
x86_64 means you are running a 64bit OS.

[Rubberman]

The x86_64 architecture covers both AMD and Intel 64 bit processors. The i3, i5, and i7 chips from Intel are all 64-bit capable. The Atom is only 32 bit.

[emiliounix]

Thank you all for your help!
I exhausted all possibilities, not hardware problem.
Finally I installed kde and the system works more than fine.
This is very strange!
With gnome, start any application takes +21 seconds, but the system works perfect using KDE (less than a blink of an eye to open anything).
Then I looked at gnome logs and found this:

X Window System Version 7.1.1
Release Date: 12 May 2006
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 7.1.1
Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.18-53.el5 x86_64 Red Hat, Inc.
Current Operating System: Linux testserver 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jan 5 17:52:25 EST 2011 x86_64
Build Date: 17 November 2010
Build ID: xorg-x11-server 1.1.1-48.76.el5_5.2
    Before reporting problems, check htp://wiki.x.org
    to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
    (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
    (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Wed Mar  2 17:26:20 2011
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"
(WW) intel(0): Failed to set up write-combining range (0xe0000000,0x10000000)
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib64/dri/_dri.so failed (/usr/lib64/dri/_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
(EE) AIGLX: reverting to software rendering
The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
> Warning:          Multiple symbols for level 1/group 1 on key <I5F>
>                   Using XF86Sleep, ignoring XF86Standby
> Warning:          Symbol map for key <I5F> redefined
>                   Using last definition for conflicting fields
Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server

Could this be the cause of the problem?