[Hamara-devel] have more desktops other than lxde and gnome-shell and performance stats.

[shirish]

Hi all,
Warning a bit of long read this one as well, sorry.

AFAIK we have two desktop-managers that we have right now. One is 
gnome-shell for good looks,  somewhat decent machines and lxde at the 
low-end.

Then we have the other guy which is lxde which is supposed to be 
'low-end' .  While I do agree that it is a good option for schools or 
for an environment which is fixed,  I would also encourage you to not 
remain tied to that because we don't know what tomorrow may bring. What 
if 3 months,  6 months  or a year down the line lxde suddenly stops 
development, then we will be in a bind.

So I would argue, we should have at least 2 more desktops than what we 
currently have.

Which brings to the next question which desktops those should be ?

Here, I would argue that we should have something which already re-uses 
lot of existing softwares that we have in hamara.

So my contention is that we add gnome-flashback and mate to that list.

Why gnome-flashback and mate ?

Because both use gtk3 and re-use quite a bit of gnome libraries (where 
it makes sense of them.)

Now I don't want people doing it blindly just because I said it, so 
let's try and get some performance stats.

While we have many a performance tools in debian, for now I would 
suggest let's stick with dstat for now.

You ask what dstat is ?

[$] aptitude show dstat | grep Description
Description: versatile resource statistics tool

Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat and ifstat. Dstat 
overcomes some of the limitations of these programs and adds some extra  
features.

While I won't go much into detail of dstat right now this is what we can 
do :-

[$] dstat -tcm 10 > dstat.csv

[7l----system---- ----total-cpu-usage---- ------memory-usage-----
      time     |usr sys idl wai hiq siq| used  buff  cach  free
23-04 21:18:39| 11   2  85   2   0   0|1369M 66.4M  464M  101M
23-04 21:18:49|  9   2  85   4   0   0|1370M 66.5M  469M 95.7M
23-04 21:18:59| 16   4  74   6   0   0|1369M 66.6M  478M 87.0M
23-04 21:19:09| 19   4  41  36   0   0|1377M 66.3M  482M 76.0M

so you can basically know what the system is doing at any point of time. 
As can be shared I have put the interval here at 10 odd seconds.

The system at my end is a grandfatherly Intel Pentium Dual-core 45nm 
Wolfdale with 2 GB DDR2 RAM.

Unfortunately, this is a very customized set-up where I have put lot of 
knobs so it performs well .(and there are still some more I need to do 
but haven't found the time+motivation to do it) so it might not be what 
the stats of a bare desktop would be but on the other hand, I have lots 
of processes happening in the background which a generic default install 
would not have.

Applications I have got running at my end (foreground) :-

a. Browser - Iceweasel/ Firefox with approx.  40 - 50 tabs open for 
about couple of hours or a bit longer than that.

(Iceweasel still leaks memory a bit when it's open for a long time, they 
are working on it and it is a much much better position than it was few 
years ago.)

b. Quassel - My IRC client
c. Gtimelog - My time-logging tool
d. Nautilus - File manager
e. Icedove -  E-mail client

This I would consider as moderate usage,  If  I were to be compiling or 
something that obviously would make it higher.

We could re-configure the above command :-

[$] dstat -tcm 10 > dstat-mate.csv

to

[$] dstat -tcm 60 > dstat.csv

to have it take a snapshot of the system-state in 60 seconds.

While the above would have been to have with the output of $ ps -aux but 
that will be going too detailed and would be like shooting trees for 
forests. We just want an overview.

Now, if it possible for people this is would I would like us to do :-

a.  Install debian on bare-metal low-end machines
b. Do default installs of gnome, gnome-flashback and mate on those systems
c. Install dstat and run the above command for about 10 mins, half an 
hour or an hour . So at the end we will have 3 desktop .csv files from 
people named dstat-mate.csv, dstat-flashback.csv and dstat-gnome.csv

I would very much like to have the stats made on Debian machines only 
even if they are on wheezy,  jessie or a mixed system like I have so 
that we have some consistency.

Once everybody had shared those, we could use it to generate a plot 
which tells which desktop consumes how much computing resources.

Of course, there are lot of variables at play here, for instance :-

a. Maybe you are/were doing some heavy computation.
b. Maybe cron was doing something.
c. Maybe you have file-indexing happening in the background.

or anything else altogether.

While a desktop is harder to measure than a server (as most servers have 
some fixed functionality most of the time and the change doesn't happen 
often) the pay-off for us who want to target education or anything else 
on the desktop (there is lots out there which is still not explored 
much) is much much more.

The better UI and flexible experience we would be able to give/share the 
more easier it would be easy for us to maintain things as well.

If there is any other monitoring or performance tool that you would have 
us use other than dstat please state that as well.

Looking for feedback, reply and the stats.  If you have any queries, let 
me know and I would do my best to solve them.

-- 
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org