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<font face="Century Schoolbook L">in-line :-</font><br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 04/24/2015 03:38 PM, Amardeep Singh
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi Shirish,
Added my comments *inline* -:
On Thursday 23 April 2015 09:50 PM, shirish wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">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.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Cool. <br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
So my contention is that we add gnome-flashback and mate to that list.
Why gnome-flashback and mate ?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">I like mate, better UI than lxde.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I have love both for GNOME flashback (used GNU/Linux quite a bit
both in GNOME 1 and GNOME 2 and that migration was a painful
period, with GNOME 3 more so but eventually you have to accept it.)
<br>
<br>
I also love mate. Both are in a sense have retro look with modern
bindings underneath so its kinda like having your cake and eating it
too :) <br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
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
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Good to know about new tool.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Cool. <br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">We have few system here with same configuration. It will be easy to test
on them.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
LOL. I thought I was one of the few who has such ancient
configuration. Nice to know that there are others. <br>
<br>
I am curious to know though what are these machines are being used
for ?<br>
<br>
I do know they can make nice low-end file-servers, back-up mail
servers etc. or are they being used as generic workstations ?<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">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.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Actually not necessary, the 30 mins. is a random/arbitrary interval
I have taken in the hopes of smoothening out of any spikes in either
CPU, memory like that and then we do a plot it should be even more
generic. I would share my stats within all three environments by
the end of the day today. <br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">We will try doing the above steps on system we got here and share the
results.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Cool, thank you. I would encourage everybody on the team to try
that because the more number of people and systems we have, the
easier it would be for us to figure out how the three desktops
behave. <br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
If there is any other monitoring or performance tool that you would
have us use other than dstat please state that as well.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">What about using tools like nmon, atop or htop.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Actually all the four are similar as they have similar
functionality. I have all the four installed at my end as well. If
there is another one with which the team is happy we can use that.
At the end of the day, it's not so much the tool but the stats that
will count. One thing I forgot to tell/share is we don't need the
time and date so those two columns should be removed. <br>
<blockquote cite="mid:553A160C.70908@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Looking for feedback, reply and the stats. If you have any queries,
let me know and I would do my best to solve them.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Thanks,
Amardeep
</pre>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Till later. <br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org</pre>
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