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Hi Shirish,<br>
<br>
Added my comments <b>inline</b> -:<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On Thursday 23 April 2015 09:50 PM,
shirish wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">Hi
all,
<br>
Warning a bit of long read this one as well, sorry.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
So I would argue, we should have at least 2 more desktops than
what we currently have.
<br>
<br>
Which brings to the next question which desktops those should be ?
<br>
<br>
Here, I would argue that we should have something which already
re-uses lot of existing softwares that we have in hamara.
<br>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<br>
So my contention is that we add gnome-flashback and mate to that
list.
<br>
<br>
Why gnome-flashback and mate ?
<br>
</blockquote>
I like mate, better UI than lxde. <br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<br>
Because both use gtk3 and re-use quite a bit of gnome libraries
(where it makes sense of them.)
<br>
<br>
Now I don't want people doing it blindly just because I said it,
so let's try and get some performance stats.
<br>
<br>
While we have many a performance tools in debian, for now I would
suggest let's stick with dstat for now.
<br>
<br>
You ask what dstat is ?
<br>
<br>
[$] aptitude show dstat | grep Description
<br>
Description: versatile resource statistics tool
<br>
<br>
Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat and ifstat.
Dstat overcomes some of the limitations of these programs and adds
some extra features.
<br>
<br>
While I won't go much into detail of dstat right now this is what
we can do :-
<br>
<br>
[$] dstat -tcm 10 > dstat.csv
<br>
<br>
[7l----system---- ----total-cpu-usage---- ------memory-usage-----
<br>
time |usr sys idl wai hiq siq| used buff cach free
<br>
23-04 21:18:39| 11 2 85 2 0 0|1369M 66.4M 464M 101M
<br>
23-04 21:18:49| 9 2 85 4 0 0|1370M 66.5M 469M 95.7M
<br>
23-04 21:18:59| 16 4 74 6 0 0|1369M 66.6M 478M 87.0M
<br>
23-04 21:19:09| 19 4 41 36 0 0|1377M 66.3M 482M 76.0M
<br>
</blockquote>
Good to know about new tool.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
The system at my end is a grandfatherly Intel Pentium Dual-core
45nm Wolfdale with 2 GB DDR2 RAM.
<br>
</blockquote>
We have few system here with same configuration. It will be easy to
test on them.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
Applications I have got running at my end (foreground) :-
<br>
<br>
a. Browser - Iceweasel/ Firefox with approx. 40 - 50 tabs open
for about couple of hours or a bit longer than that.
<br>
<br>
(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.)
<br>
<br>
b. Quassel - My IRC client
<br>
c. Gtimelog - My time-logging tool
<br>
d. Nautilus - File manager
<br>
e. Icedove - E-mail client
<br>
<br>
This I would consider as moderate usage, If I were to be
compiling or something that obviously would make it higher.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">We
could re-configure the above command :-
<br>
<br>
[$] dstat -tcm 10 > dstat-mate.csv
<br>
<br>
to
<br>
<br>
[$] dstat -tcm 60 > dstat.csv
<br>
<br>
to have it take a snapshot of the system-state in 60 seconds.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
Now, if it possible for people this is would I would like us to do
:-
<br>
<br>
a. Install debian on bare-metal low-end machines
<br>
b. Do default installs of gnome, gnome-flashback and mate on those
systems
<br>
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
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
Once everybody had shared those, we could use it to generate a
plot which tells which desktop consumes how much computing
resources.
<br>
<br>
Of course, there are lot of variables at play here, for instance
:-
<br>
<br>
a. Maybe you are/were doing some heavy computation.
<br>
b. Maybe cron was doing something.
<br>
c. Maybe you have file-indexing happening in the background.
<br>
<br>
or anything else altogether.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
</blockquote>
We will try doing the above steps on system we got here and share
the results.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">
<br>
If there is any other monitoring or performance tool that you
would have us use other than dstat please state that as well.
<br>
</blockquote>
What about using tools like nmon, atop or htop.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:55391BE3.3030302@hamaralinux.org" type="cite">Looking
for feedback, reply and the stats. If you have any queries, let
me know and I would do my best to solve them.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
Thanks,<br>
Amardeep<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
AMARDEEP SINGH
Hamara Architect
Team Hamara Linux
</pre>
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