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

[Amardeep Singh]

Hi Shirish,

Added my comments *inline* -:

On Thursday 23 April 2015 09:50 PM, shirish wrote:
> 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.
This does make sense. Though lxde development is stable so far, but it
is little slow. As you said it may not stop now but what in future so I
would agree to ship other desktops.
>
> So my contention is that we add gnome-flashback and mate to that list.
>
> Why gnome-flashback and mate ?
I like mate, better UI than lxde.
>
> 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
Good to know about new tool.
>
> 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.
We have few system here with same configuration. It will be easy to test
on them.
>
> 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.
>
So, once system is configured user should be doing daily work on it for
at least 30 mins or so in order to capture the stats.
> 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.
We will try doing the above steps on system we got here and share the
results.
>
> If there is any other monitoring or performance tool that you would
> have us use other than dstat please state that as well.
What about using tools like nmon, atop or htop.

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

-- 
AMARDEEP SINGH
Hamara Architect
Team Hamara Linux

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