When you suffer from system lag what is your cpu consumption and memory usage like?

System >> KSysGuard should help.

Note: Click on the 'CPU %' column and sort from Highest to Lowest.
Note Note: The 'System Load' tab is also very useful.

The problem could be 1 (or a combination) of 3 (or more) things: CPU is overloaded, lots of stuff is accessing the harddrives, or you're running out of RAM and the system is forced to use swap(harddrive).

Last edited by kit89 on 24 October 2021 at 7:19 pm UTC

Quoting: kit89When you suffer from system lag what is your cpu consumption and memory usage like?

System >> KSysGuard should help.

Note: Click on the 'CPU %' column and sort from Highest to Lowest.
Note Note: The 'System Load' tab is also very useful.

The problem could be 1 (or a combination) of 3 (or more) things: CPU is overloaded, lots of stuff is accessing the harddrives, or you're running out of RAM and the system is forced to use swap(harddrive).

I used to the top command, as it does a nice job of organizing not only the CPU % of each process, but overall CPU %. Here is the output when I am hearing audio stuttering:

https://pastebin.com/WCVCjx95

Last edited by classl3ss on 24 October 2021 at 7:35 pm UTC

This looks interesting:

 
MiB Mem :  15987.7 total,    200.8 free,   8404.2 used,   7382.7 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   2015.5 free,     32.5 used.   6686.4 avail Mem 

It looks like you're tapping into swap, you may have too many applications running for the amount of memory you have available.

As a reference here is my system:

 
MiB Mem :  32014.4 total,  16173.0 free,   6171.3 used,   9670.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   4767.0 total,   4767.0 free,      0.0 used.  24917.2 avail Mem 

Note that I have 4767MB of swap available, and I have used 0.0.

If we can correlate your lag and swap activity we can determine if it's excessive memory consumption that's the problem.

Last edited by kit89 on 24 October 2021 at 7:52 pm UTC

Quoting: kit89This looks interesting:

 
MiB Mem :  15987.7 total,    200.8 free,   8404.2 used,   7382.7 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   2015.5 free,     32.5 used.   6686.4 avail Mem 

It looks like you're tapping into swap, you may have too many applications running for the amount of memory you have available.

As a reference here is my system:

 
MiB Mem :  32014.4 total,  16173.0 free,   6171.3 used,   9670.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   4767.0 total,   4767.0 free,      0.0 used.  24917.2 avail Mem 

Note that I have 4767MB of swap available, and I have used 0.0.

If we can correlate your lag and swap activity we can determine if it's excessive memory consumption that's the problem.

That is odd, because I it was suddenly one day that I started running into this issue, without any chance in my computer habits. Could there be something going on terms of software that has changed my memory usage?

Or does RAM age such that I should just consider upgrading my RAM?

Right now I am using Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4 GB) 16000 MHZ.

Last edited by classl3ss on 24 October 2021 at 7:59 pm UTC

Also, y'all are all great. Thank you so much for working with me on this! Hopefully we can find a solution :)

Quoting: classl3ssOr does RAM age such that I should just consider upgrading my RAM?

It's not a hardware issue, it seems to be a software problem.

You can use:

 
top -o %MEM

to order processes by their memory usage. Let's see if anything stands out as an obvious culprit.

I did as you instructed. Here is the output: https://pastebin.com/HCC8uJRA

Quoting: classl3ssI did as you instructed. Here is the output: https://pastebin.com/HCC8uJRA

With 16GB of RAM roughly 1% == 163MB

So bg3.exe is consuming roughly 1678.9MB (your previous top had bg3 consuming about 2.4GB).

GeckoMain and Web Content is related to Firefox, with all of them accumulated is 16.4% or 2.7GB

The processes that start with Cr such as CrBrowserMain and CrRenderMain are related to Chromium. From what I can tell there is about 8.8% or 1.5GB

Afterwards Steam, latte-dock, Signal, Dropbox, and Discord are contenders for heavy memory usage. Each of these applications spin off multiple child processes, so their actual memory usage is likely significantly higher.

If memory serves me right Signal, Dropbox, and Discord are not 'native' applications they are web applications running in their own copy of the Chromium Web Browser.

I recommend systemically closing each of the applications and finding out what processes disappear from top, then identify how much memory it frees up. After you've closed a bunch of them down, reopen (one at a time) and see how much memory each application consumes.

Also each Tab in a Web Browser creates its own process, for Firefox this is those Web Content processes. You'll want to get in the habit of closing unused tabs.



Side Note: If you want to kill a process via the command line you can use the PID (first column in top).

 
kill -9 <PID>

for example to kill bg3.exe in your last pastebin you could use:

 
kill -9 61823

Note this may not kill all child processes, such as wine!

To give an example of unexpected memory usage, I had Chrome open that spun off 30 processes, each process consumed around 50-150MB. Only when I closed all Chrome windows did it free up 4.5GB of my RAM.

Also, historically KDE4 had a lot of memory leaks. I haven't used Plasma 5 enough to comment, but it isn't exactly lightweight. But yeah, web browsers these days eat RAM like toddlers eat candy. I could wax poetic about the failings of modern web design for hours!

Your HDD seems fine, nothing alarming.

The ArchWiki has a great section on the various SSD/HDD io schedulers. The same page also has a section called Improving system responsiveness under low-memory conditions.. It might help.