xpdf woes, was Re: New RAM, does Debian has a tool to benchmark?
On Fri 10 Apr 2020 at 09:26:44 (+0300), dalios wrote:
[…]
> * With the 4 GB RAM that I now have available, I have noticed my PC
> becoming slow and the memory usage going quite high. After booting,
> with just Gnome running, I see conky reporting that memory usage goes
> to something like 800 MB. Firefox adds ~800MB more and Thunderbird
> adds up to a total of more than 2 or maybe 2,5 GB! After launching
> Transmission (bit torrent client) I see that I have to restart Firefox
> quite often in order for the PC to be usable (especially after
> browsing a little and having many tabs open or even after some tabs
> have been closed). I have noticed that things got worst after
> upgrading to Stable (I was on oldstable until recently).
If things have got worse with stable/buster, is it possible that you
use xpdf to browse sizeable documents?
I find 4GB very adequate for browsing with lots of tabs etc, but
reading PDFs (like many people, I've been reading some large reports
and court filings over the last year or two) on buster can bring the
computer to its knees quite rapidly. When I switch back to Firefox,
fvwm displays its window, but Firefox can take half a minute or more
just to rerender itself.
The bugs concerned are
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926501
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=942086
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=945188
As my workaround, I've modified mc's mc.ext file to open PDFs
with xpdf when I press Return, but with zathura when I press F3.
(But I miss my customisations of xpdf with the latter.)
> * I haven't been checking on swap usage a lot so I don't know how is
> that used.
Swap growth is a clear symptom of the above if it's happening.
> * I have two HDD hard drives installed in the system.
> * Up to now I have only been using Memtest86+ to check the memory's
> integrity but I didn't know that it can be used to see other
> performance metrics. I will check that now.
> * I will also the dbench (which I haven't heard of before) as well as
> use the apt-cache command you suggested. If the information I give in
> this message helps you to suggest something specific please do, as
> hardware in general and especially benchmarks is not something I am
> particularly familiar with.
Personally, I've never bothered; I rely on the performance
I experience while doing my habitual tasks. But that's partly
because I don't have an easy way to remedy matters.
Cheers,
David.
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