Hi everyone!

My daily driver is a Surface Go 1 running Fedora with 8GB of ram and 128GB of storage. It is always hooked up to a Philips 273B screen via USB-C.

Most of the time, it is really fast and a perfect tiny Linux and Gnome machine easily hookable to a big screen for when you’re not travelling.

However, sometimes, after installing updates but maybe not always, it is slow as hell. Sometimes, detaching the Surface from the big screen and hooking it again, solves the issue, but not always. It is a behavior I already had when I was using Ubuntu and I’ve had on Fedora since version 36.

Here are some useful printscreens from HTOP and the ressource management system:

#high cpu usage

#low cpu usage

I thought that maybe installing the Surface kernel would stop the issue, but it didn’t…

Sometimes it’s annoying enough to make me just want to use my wife’s MacBook Pro 2012 running Fedora as a daily driver but the form factor is less practical.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Edit: it happens on startup, even after days of inactivity

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Hence:

    After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again

    If it’s like the last htop image should be no problem.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Turning off swap could make things much worse though. The system will have less memory for file caches.

      I’d leave swap alone, just monitor for whether the system is paging frequently. “vmstat 3” should show if you’re writing to swap frequently.

      • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Turning off swap could make things much worse though

        How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)

        Anecdotally, this maneuver can help tremendously tonrecover responsiveness in some cases. I guess the overall sitiation could be improved by tweaking vm.swappiness.

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          21·
          4 hours ago

          How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)

          $ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           64141       17213       24010        1984       30297       46927
Swap:          20479           0       20479

          See that buff/cache column? That’s memory being used by the system for caching. Files you you open and access get cached into memory as do inodes, filesystem objects, etc. If you run a “find / -type f” twice in a row the second one will be significantly faster because the first run cached a lot of objects into memory.

          By starving the system of memory all that will be flushed and you get more disk access doing things you’re actually trying to do. Whereas things sitting in swap are there because they aren’t currently needed.

          By turning off swap and then back on again you’re just forcing the system to drop all that cache which it will then attempt to reclaim space for and push things back out to swap.

          I don’t know what benefit you think you’ll gain in the process.