Light browser chews up 100% of the CPU power

[LNSmith]

The Light browser falls into an elephant pit.

I am running uPupBB (the 32bit busy beaver) on a Pentium P4.
So: Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz Speed of Core 0:3000 MHz, 1:3000 MHz
Core Count: 1.

Memory Allocation: Total RAM: 2004 MB, Used RAM: 1205 MB
Free RAM: 799 MB Buffers: 67 MB Cached: 629 MB Total Swap: 255 MB Free Swap: 90 MB

Distro: BionicPup32 19.03

Observations of the fault.
Light: 48.0

The fault is evident when playing 'youtube'. The fault MAY involve scripts/ads, but this is only a guess.
When Light is running 'normally' CPU usage can be 15 .. 40+% when 2 or 3 tabs are open.
The first indication of the fault: CPU usage creeps up toward 80 .. 90 .. 100%
Another indication: I hear the fan speed increase.
Another indication: The sound (at first) becomes 'clipped'.

After this the sound starts to 'stutter'. If I do nothing the interval between the stuttering grows and then I hear distinct 'gaps' in the sound. At this point I go to the task-bar and try to kill Light. After some pause I see the menu 'close/kill/maximize ...' If I select 'kill' (the only real option at this stage) some time later (seconds or even a minute the confirmation box appears. I read "I may lose info if I continue". I click 'OK'.

This is the interesting bit. The message box disappears and Light also disappears, but the sound (with long gaps) continues. It can take 10 seconds or several minutes before the (broken) sound stops. At the time the sound disappears the fan-speed drops. To comment on 'broken' sound. I hear short 'grabs' with silence between the 'grabs'. It seems that the task swapping proceeds in discreet 'chunks' with some considerable interval between the sound 'grabs'.

The fault completely ties up every process on the desk-top. I can also re-gain control by pressing <ctrl> + <alt> + <backspace>. For me the fault is frustrating. For most people, they would take an axe to the computer (or go back to Windows).

The question: What causes this problem and how can it be solved.
Final comment: I'm running uPupBB 32 as downloaded from the 'official' page.

All the best!
Leslie.

[peebee]

The question: What causes this problem and how can it be solved.

Hi Leslie

Answer: Download and switch to a proper heavyweight browser using Menu -> Get Web Browser

Light, as its name implies, is a lightweight starter-for-10 browser provided to get you going with the strong expectation (as mentioned in the System Startup Notes) that it should be replaced for any serious use. Youtube is definitely serious use!

[mikeb]

serious mp4 playback eh...... ye olde technology. Streaming a web video is not rocket science in itself.
The symptoms you describe sound like ram filling up.... either the ramdisk or directly.

There is much to cause this on the web (javascript and excessive css) now and may not necessarily be the video causing the problem unless you are trying to play high resolution..... if so choose lower.

I have used Light for you tube and others quite often and it simply does the job. Larger browser on a system that seems to be struggling may not help.

Another alternative is to use a you tube downloader site...pop in the page link and get a video to play without ads and spyware.

Standby for a long thread....

Mike

[perdido]

Could be something to do with a limited swap.
These guys recommend a 1GB swap for 2GB of RAM
Its all black magic voodoo as far as I can tell.

[Mike Walsh]

@ Les:-

I hate to tell ya this, kiddo, but part of the problem might simply be your CPU..! And perdido's suggestion might be worth investigating, too; with video, you want maximum resources to do the job properly.

The Pentium 4's were billed by Intel, in the early 2000s, as being "multimedia-ready", but the sad truth - and I can confirm this from long experience - is that they're basically crap at it.

What model number P4 are we looking at, here? Menu → System → PupSysInfo should tell you....

Even t'other Mike's previous-gen Pentium III makes a better job of things; this is, after all, the same P6 architecture that Intel returned to for the Pentium Ms, and I believe even the "Core" architecture can trace its roots back here, too.....

The P4 was Intel's answer to AMD wiping the floor with the Athlon XPs, and was predicated on one thing, and one thing only.....to run as fast as possible. "NetBurst" was very, very good at running super-fast, and could make use of that speed due to its exta-deep 'pipeline'.....but the instruction sets were pretty basic. SSE2s for a long time, and only started to make use of SSE3s when they brought hyperthreading out, which it appears you have.

Be that as it may, even the later enthusiast 600-series P4s still weren't very good, due mainly to the fact that Intel graphics all those years ago were pretty much, um, (*"rubbish"*). "Prescott" suffered from parasitic current leakage at the atomic level, and overheated like crazy! From what I understand, everything got re-written/re-worked/re-built for "Core", and they basically started with a clean sheet.....along with a newer, younger, more 'focused' design team.

---------------------------------

peebee's right, of course. "Light" is essentially just installed to be able to download something better; I've never had much luck with it myself. Give my Palemoon-portable a look - or, if you don't want to have to change at the end of this year, when Moonchild Productions finally knock 32-bit PaleMoon on the head - try Fred's portable-FF Quantum installer script.

Modern Quantum is way better than older FFs used to be, trust me.


Mike.

[tallboy]

In my experience, Palemoon is kept relatively small, but then I don't use history or bookmarks. BTW, Mike, the size of the portable Vivaldi is shocking!

[LNSmith]

G'day everybody:

I will answer the many posts above in due course. I DO appreciate your comments. Vy informative. I'm away from my main machine/home at the moment (using a slower Pentium M on a laptop and .... running uPupBB on 'Light') So ... full answer soon but in the meantime ....

"Q" fr. Mike Walsh:

What model number P4 are we looking at,

At home: Pentium P4 single core. 3GHz. The specs in my first post came from Puppy-sys-info, but sysinfo can give more detail than the spec I provided. Best I can give until I return home.
THIS LAPTOP (away fr. home: running the same Puppy OS) : Pentium M processor 1.40GHz. Clock: 133 MHz. Speed: 600/1400 MHz.
Current Speed 1400 MHz. Core: 1 32 bit (of course).
Haven't used this so much at my desk-top BUT I see a diff. bet 1.4GHz and 3GHz machines. BUT cannot say (with certainty) whether the prob. is the slower CPU or a slower internet connection. Nothing is simple ...

@all I will reply to all major points when I'm back home. In short I want to make older boxes and laptops - gathering dust - work. In Covid lock-up we have many students who need the internet (for school) and I'm want to work with the local Salvation Army as a collection and re-distribution point for older machines. This will allow me to 'stay out of the way' and fix things - I can do that - while the SA deals with the public (they are good at that).

So .. "dd" puppy and a bit of 'know-how' are my helper. Plus ... helpful forum members.

Leslie

So ... ttfn. I'll keep every-one posted in the next day or so.

Leslie

[wiak]

Memory Allocation: Total RAM: 2004 MB, Used RAM: 1205 MB
Free RAM: 799 MB Buffers: 67 MB Cached: 629 MB Total Swap: 255 MB Free Swap: 90 MB
...
The first indication of the fault: CPU usage creeps up toward 80 .. 90 .. 100%
Another indication: I hear the fan speed increase.
Another indication: The sound (at first) becomes 'clipped'.

After this the sound starts to 'stutter'.

Your system is using lots of swap... so it is thrashing - slow input/output from slow hard disk, so using lots of CPU in the swapping between slow hard disk and RAM. You need to avoid that via more RAM or perhaps zram would help. Any use of swap on old machines like that involves big slowdowns/audio-video stuttering, hard disk getting thrashed constant read/writing pages in and out of RAM.

Observer cpu usage with top and you should see i/o is the issue; the wa value for %CPU is waiting for io, so probably you'll find that is high. There is also a specific utility called iotop that is specifically for io usage monitoring though I doubt that is available by default in Puppy.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... -cpu-usage

EDIT: Actually, I see you have 2GB RAM and a fair amount remaining free; my advice would be to try without any swap at all (rather than increasing that as some suggest, which would simply encourage disk-thrashing). You could also simply reduce 'swappiness':

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap albeit Arch uses systemd

or simply using

Code: Select all

echo X > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

where X =0 for swap basically not used, and 10 maybe better (less aggressive swapping) than original default of 60. Linux has become relatively intelligent about when to use swap, but maybe not always, and perhaps your hard disk is dodgy/failing...?

https://linuxhint.com/understanding_vm_swappiness/

wiak

[Mike Walsh]

@ wiak/Leslie:-

Partsman put together a wee .pet for "swappiness".

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=100219

It can be downloaded from his Dropbox a/c, but I've added it here as an attachment.....it's quicker d/l'ing from the forum than it is to go through Dropbox's lengthy "verification" procedures! (Hope ya don't mind, mate!)

It's set with the 'recommended' swappiness value of 10, but it's easy enough to change that if desired. Just go into /etc/sysctl.conf, and edit to change to the value you want. I run mine at

Code: Select all

vm.swappiness=5

.....since I'm now equipped with 16 GB RAM, and want Puppy to use it rather than swap. Even though I've got nearly 25 GB of swap-space - I have bits & pieces of swap area all over the place - I'd prefer that this humungous amount of RAM be used instead..!


Mike.

[LNSmith]

@wiak
@mike

OK - back home on my desktop. Working on the principle of one topic at a time I'm responding to comments about swap-file and swapping.

To begin: I'm confused by the info I see and (because of this) I cannot answer your questions reliably. But let's see. First - I provide snapshots from 'take-a-shot' i.e. TAS. It's a screen grabber. You can see 6 snapshots below. You'll have to download some to see.

This is what I see from Pup-Sys-Info (PSI).
Memory Allocation:
Total RAM: 2004 MB
Used RAM: 1837 MB
Free RAM: 167 MB
Buffers: 111 MB
Cached: 942 MB
Total Swap: 0 MB
Free Swap: 0 MB

This contradicts the previous posting where swap memory is used.
Where has my swap file gone?
After reading one posting (above) I increased the size of my swap-file, but I don't remember how I did that. It may be that I disabled the swapping process when I increased the size. Again, I don't know.

I'll end now and post.
I'll read the reply to this - then answer 'swappiness'.
Just have to remember to attach the snapshots! (and I did!)

Thank for your help.
TTFN
Leslie