Hi. I have had Udoo duo for about a week now. Bought a micro sd card, a wireless keyboard and a mouse. I am using it with my secondary computer screen and it is working. The thing is that it is pretty slow. When the Kickstarter campaign was going on we got to see some pictures and videos of the developers showing the capabilities of the Udoo and often they would use the Duo and not the Quad. They were pretty impressive with high frames per second and what not. Now that I am using it simply to browse the net and install some software using the Ubuntu software center (which I installed my self) it is lagging and unresponsive. I am not sure if it simply is not powerful enough to handle this well or if there is something I am doing wrong. So I guess my main point is: HELP! What can I do to see if my system is doing something it is not supposed to do? Can you recommend commands to run for this and that to figure something out and to eliminate some possibilities. Thanks everyone.
im sure some more knowledgeable will be able to jump in here nad help but i wills tart off with a few basic questions. * When you reviewing the system usage using the resource manager or the 'top' command, do you see hi CPU usage? * What class SD card do you have? * what is exactly that is slow, just browsing the Ubuntu Software center? im not really sure that is goign to work well, i think that is target more towards desktop/x86 software were as the UDOO Runs Linaro, a slimmed down ARM based version of UDOO. Its far from the same as what you would get on a desktop from a UI and UE standpoint. Lets start with the various activities that you are doing, how are slow are they, do them with a terminal open and the top command running to watch things.. i recommend top over the gui system monitor because the system monitor itself, especially when showing the CPU graphs can chew up half a core all on its own. We should also try and establish that while the UDOO team has spent most of thier time finalizing the hardware to get it out to all of us, the software side is what is under heavy development right now so your input and feedback could be very helpful to the UDOO team in making future improvements.
I realize that it is not exactly comparable to a desktop machine but I was still expecting something better than this. I just want to be clear ---> I am not complaining about the product. The product is exactly how it was specified and that is all good. <---- I am simply surprised and I think there is something wrong. Since that is out of the way.. My system has the linux image on a 32GB class 10 micro sd card from SanDisk. I have the terminal open and the System Monitor as well. Other than that it is totally idle. I am not downloading, installing or doing any other thing (to my knowledge). When I open the system monitor on the resources tab it shows CPU1 at 40-50% and CPU2 at 40-50% That is waaaaay to much. Memory and swap history show Memory at 317.3 MiB (51.1% )out of 621.6 MiB and Swap at 0 out of 0. Thought it was 1GB memory? Network is at receiving some bytes here and there. When I open the System tab it shows: UBUNTU release 11.10 ( oneiric), Kernel Linux 3.0.35, GNOME 3.2.0 HARDWARE Memory 621.6 MiB, Processor ARMv7 Processor rev 10 (v7l). SYSTEM STATUS Available disk space 4.0 GiB In the Processes tab it reads in the top: Load averages for the last 1,5,15 minutes: 2.34, 2.89, 2.81 I have 32 processes in total. 31 of them has the status "sleeping" and 1 has "running". The one that is running is the System monitor itself. Showing 12-16% cpu usage. I hope that is good information for analysis.
Another thing to look at is your power source. I've found that my power source which is only 1A leads to some performance issues.
close system monitor and watch most of that usage go away.. as i posted in my first reply, for some reason the system monitor alone consumes a crap tone of CPU cycles, ESPECIALLY if its on the resources tab So close that and lets establish a base idle load using only 'top'
well its more for you to see.. the easiest way to view the data is to open the terminal Run the top command, then when its loaded press the ' i ' key this will remove idle processes What is left is what is actively running. you can see the current memory and CPU usage of any processes that are running and active. Remember though if you can have 2 process each using 80%.. as its listed per core. so your total maximum would be 400% or 200% for a quad core or a dual core. In the top in the CPU row you can see the user and system related process in % also. The top most row has the load averages but in other threads we have established that the info there might not be accurate so lets ignore that for now. use this instead of the resource Monitor to see resource utilization. From this point do you work.. and if you find things are slow see what active processes are running and if they seem to be more 'active' than they should be. Help us explain what it is your are doing that is so slow or that is unresponsive.
Here is the information from the top: Load average: 2.16,2.36,3.12 Tasks: 102 total, 1 running, 101 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpus: 1.3%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.8%id, 0% in the rest of them. Mem: 636544k total, 351112k used, 285496k free, 5508k buffers Swap: 0 total, 0 used, 0 free, 107160k cached Command Xorg is on top of the cpu usage at 1 - 1.2% and it shows the TIME+ as being 17:21.39 USER is root. Not sure what his TIME+ is. Second is top command at 0.5% cpu usage and TIME+ as 0:23.02. User Ubuntu. Not sure if there is something else you need. It seems as there is not so high usage on my system at idle. My main concern is the memory. It is supposed to be 1GB but is at 636MB. Jaeg: I am using a power adapter that I had from a router I used back in the day. It is 12V and 2 amp output. DC obviously. Running Udoo on idle makes the power supply a bit warm almost undetectable. The heat sink is a bit warm but very touchable. My guess is around 25 degrees celcius for the heat sink just using my touch. The power supply is of type Sagem model: KSAP0201200200HEC Thanks for your help.
Again, i dont really need to see it, but from what you have shown there isnt much running so thats a good thing. This is more for you to watch while you are doing things. When you do something that causes you to say "man this is slow" which is why you started this thread, then look at the "top" output first, to see what's going on. We have to establish that you are saying it is slow.. so far other than you thinking it should be faster we dont have much to help you with, we dont even know "what" you feel should be faster other than maybe the Ubuntu Software center, which im not sure is meant for Linaro. Regarding the memory, its a known thing and will be resolved int eh next release you can read al about it here viewtopic.php?f=2&t=120 From this point, we will would request more specific details about what you are doing and what you mean by "its too slow" Such as "when i open chromium it takes 15 seconds to open a new tab"... "when i have the Arduino IDE Open and then i try and click the Application menu/submenu it takes x seconds to respond and open. Im not trying to dismiss your problem, i'm just trying to get clarification on what exactly is the problem.
What class of micro sd card are you using? Try Class 10 or faster. But the fastest speed you can see on Udoo might be around 20MB/s for read and write, I guess.
Well... watching a video file is very slow. I have a video file on a usb stick that I plug into one of the usb ports on the Udoo. I have installed VLC player and when I play the file in VLC player it runs at 5 frames per second or so. Totally unwatchable. Since I was hoping to use Udoo as a media player then this is a very big issue for me and I am shocked that it does not play it flawlessly. The file is not even full HD. Even when I copy the file to the SD card and run it from there. As for the web browser slowness, it is just generally slow. When I go to a webpage the images load slowly. When I scroll down it lags and chops. I am using the same internet connection as my main computer and it does not behave like that so it is not the internet. The Ubuntu software center was just a way for me to get other software conveniently. Like VLC. I am going to bed now. I will check back in the morning. Thanks again.
Can you run top in a terminal while using either VLC or Chromium? The main question I think we need to get at is whether the issue is excessive CPU usage by the process, or one core being used heavily while the other sits idle, or whether it's spending a lot of time in "iowait" status (i.e. waiting for your SD card to finish its reads and writes), or whether it's running low on RAM and a swapfile is needed. Also, if you could look at the system's clock rate (`cpupower --freq` or `cpupower --hwfreq` if you have the program installed, or `cpufreq-info`) when things are slow to make sure that it's not being throttled for some reason (selection of the wrong governor, or a bad configuration of maximum speed, etc) that would eliminate another variable. [NOTE: I don't have my Udoo yet so I can't verify how well cpufreq-utils works on it.]
You may want to give Debian a try, it current does not have any hardware acceleration, but it does run many videos just fine through VLC. http://www.elinux.org/UDOO_Installing_D ... ry_Tarball (LXDE version is more up to date)
simmisj, try to use the media player we pre-installed on Ubuntu, VLC doesn’t support the graphic acceleration yet. You’ll se a big difference on CPU usage if you run top in a terminal. About the browser we didn’t experiencing this kind of slowness, it works just fine. Btw if you want to use UDOO as media center wait for XBMC, a fully-working release for UDOO will be available very soon. Cheers
r4v5: Here is the top command during various runs. using VLC in windowed mode: Code: top - 13:35:29 up 14 min, 1 user, load average: 3.78, 3.70, 2.35 Tasks: 112 total, 3 running, 109 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 39.0%us, 18.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 42.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.8%si, 0.0%st Mem: 636544k total, 591776k used, 44768k free, 30280k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 294088k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 6269 ubuntu 20 0 290m 42m 16m S 49 6.9 3:28.73 vlc 5713 root 20 0 364m 9292 4096 R 46 1.5 3:25.27 Xorg 6032 ubuntu 9 -11 164m 4620 3104 S 6 0.7 1:11.16 pulseaudio 6157 ubuntu 20 0 116m 12m 8228 R 6 1.9 0:06.86 gnome-terminal 5982 ubuntu 20 0 37028 9384 6924 S 2 1.5 0:13.28 me Using VLC in fullscreen: Code: top - 13:38:29 up 17 min, 1 user, load average: 4.31, 4.01, 2.71 Tasks: 113 total, 3 running, 110 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 61.2%us, 8.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 30.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st Mem: 636544k total, 619104k used, 17440k free, 27740k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 293592k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 6269 ubuntu 20 0 303m 47m 20m S 105 7.7 5:11.07 vlc 5713 root 20 0 387m 13m 7716 R 19 2.1 4:43.08 Xorg 6032 ubuntu 9 -11 164m 4648 3120 S 4 0.7 1:21.99 pulseaudio 5982 ubuntu 20 0 38116 9584 6928 S 1 1.5 0:17.94 metacity 3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:02.27 ksoftirqd/0 6756 ubuntu 20 0 2312 1024 744 R 1 0.2 0:01.88 top Using chromium with two tabs: Code: top - 13:42:46 up 21 min, 1 user, load average: 4.45, 4.21, 3.11 Tasks: 113 total, 3 running, 110 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 62.9%us, 20.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 16.1%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 636544k total, 437892k used, 198652k free, 3380k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 87768k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 6897 ubuntu 20 0 128m 37m 16m R 77 6.0 0:03.44 chromium-browse 6810 ubuntu 20 0 270m 25m 12m S 55 4.2 0:33.06 chromium-browse 5713 root 20 0 424m 14m 8564 S 17 2.3 5:49.96 Xorg 6778 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 5 0.0 0:01.40 kworker/u:1 5 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 4 0.0 0:03.61 kworker/u:0 5998 ubuntu 20 0 118m 13m 3748 S 3 2.2 0:18.26 gnome-panel 6050 ubuntu 20 0 148m 11m 2708 S 3 1.8 0:15.55 nautilus 5910 ubuntu 20 0 113m 5908 2260 S 2 0.9 0:04.88 gnome-settings- 6157 ubuntu 20 0 117m 6808 1976 S 2 1.1 0:12.44 gnome-terminal 6866 ubuntu 20 0 2312 676 388 R 1 0.1 0:01.61 top When loading the software center: Code: top - 13:49:13 up 28 min, 1 user, load average: 3.87, 3.49, 3.13 Tasks: 112 total, 2 running, 110 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 50.1%us, 7.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 41.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.8%si, 0.0%st Mem: 636544k total, 606888k used, 29656k free, 8220k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 172100k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 7053 ubuntu 20 0 298m 118m 20m R 96 19.1 0:32.54 software-center 1401 root 20 0 0 0 0 D 15 0.0 0:22.72 mmcqd/0 5713 root 20 0 405m 8368 1388 S 5 1.3 6:29.74 Xorg 6157 ubuntu 20 0 117m 6852 1996 S 1 1.1 0:16.05 gnome-terminal 6912 ubuntu 20 0 2312 528 240 R 1 0.1 0:03.46 top ags131: I would like to be able to do other things as well. I want to be able to program the Arduino board for example. Is that possible with the Debian you are referring to? delba: I tried the built in media player before but it did not want to open the file. Now I tried it again and it opened the file but played the video faster than normal. Something like 1.5x or 2x. BUT it runs the same in full screen mode (faster than normal as with windowed mode). So I guess the hardware acceleration is doing its job there. But it is very weird that it plays the video so fast. Have not heard of XBMC before. If it turns the Udoo into a media center eliminating other uses for Udoo then I do not want to use that. But if it is something that can run on the side then it is interesting. I might add that simply opening up www.google.com takes a long time. (more than 10 seconds, up to 30 seconds) I am stunned....
Yes you'd probably would be able to program the Arduino side from Debian. It may take some configuring but as far as I'm aware the Arduino shows up as a serial device by default.
i tried to play a video but i couldn't get the built in media player to work at all so that test didn't get very far. For me, Chromium works just fine. its slower than a desktop, but that is to be expected. When i compare to my other Single board computers. My PCDuino actually runs the same Linaro/Ubuntu OS and chromium but only 1 core and it performs comparably. The raspberry pi does not run Chromium well at all so i can't compare there. But for an ARM chip mine seems to be ok.. Looking at your VLC Usage it seems that it used 1 full core, and its not capable of SMP so thats all its going to use. which means the performance would be the same on a 1CPU or a 10 CPU system. Its still only going to get 1x 1GHz ARM CPU to work with. Regarding XMBC, it can be setup on the SD card to be the sole purpose for the UDOO, it can also be setup as an application you can choose to launch within UDOO Linaro OS (This is how PCDUino does it) but remember what your UDOO does is 100% dependant on what you have on your SD card.. re-imaging the card or swapping cards changes the role, so dont think the UDOO would be useless if you decide to load up an XBMC image. Its extremely flexible. and taking and making images is VERY simple. This evening i will try and run some more tests with different media types, but frankly i couldn't even get the media player to open last night, which is why i gave up so quick on overall testing. i will look in to it more later and see if it needs its own thread If i can get it to work i will go though my normal methodical testing and try and post a series of baselines and performance statistics to set proper expectations. Just remember this is not a desktop computer, and on paper it seems like it would be pretty powerful, its still a SoB Computer and we should maintain our expectations accordingly.
The VLC issue is indeed most likely the lack of hardware acceleration for video playback. It not only has to decode the video file in software, but it has to use a driver that communicates with Xorg (the display server), which you can see also using a significant amount of CPU in both fullscreen and windowed mode. The Software Center is stalling out because it's reading from the SD card -- you can see the high percentage of CPU time spent in the iowait ("wa") state. I don't know if this is just because of how much Software Center has to read and write, or if there's a bug hiding in the MMC code. Try using aptitude or apt-get from a console for a bit instead and see if performance improves on things. Chromium is confusing to me, though, not going to lie. It's a pretty heavyweight program, but should be within the abilities of the board, if it's getting 2D acceleration in X to do some of the heavy lifting. Seeing it use almost the same amount of CPU as a fullscreen VLC playback makes me curious about the X setup, but I'm unfortunately debugging blind here for a few days and can't dig into that further. Anyone with a well-behaved board able to verify that they're getting 2D acceleration?
