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Monitoring CPU and RAM Usage (linux-dash and alternatives)
I have had a RN104, (OS 6.4.2), for some time now but have often thought that it was running a bit slow. For example I have DVBLink TV Server installed and when opening it up from another device it o...
That was just my opinion. It isn't bogus or misleading, just only so much the little Marvell Armada CPU can do :) Honestly, has I said it serves up my media files perfectly. I just found running some of the varous apps (Plex, the Virus scan, pigwo, and enabling iTunes or DNLA) running at the same time while trying to access the files via Plex (streaming mkv files) it isn't effient and uses a lot of CPU. That is why I mentioned running top and saving the output so you can see the CPU use and Waits.
The way we have it set up is probably simple but more or less it is the centralized storage for our home. All of our computers back up to it. It also serves our media (Music and Movies) via Plex. Plex is running on Ubuntu and NFS mounting the NAS shares. Once a week the 104 sends its data to another PC in the house with lots of storage who shoots it up to Crashplan. Documents, photos, computer backups, and music mostly - I don't back up the movies since I have the physical media still.
Down the road I'm sure I'll expand my Ubuntu server with a raid card and ZFS or some other files system/RAID and remove the 104 since it would be significantly faster with regards to disk I/O and network. But so far NAS to TV or other streaming device it is ok and I can tolerate the 20 - 30MB/Sec transfer rate it seems to see when transferring files.
So yeah, it is good at one or two things but not for running Plex or some of the more CPU intensive applications while also serving up media. I think that is pretty fair to say. It really comes down to the CPU and Memory amount it has as the limiting factor.
Sorry, I don't understand - what does "measured with top" mean?
What does load average between 0.1 and 0.2 equate to? (10 to 20% CPU usage ??).
Do you have any services such as DVBLink TV Server or Logitech Media Server running in the background?
OK, now I think I understand: "Top" is a tool built in to the ReadyNAS operating system?
I SSH'd in and ran Top and this is the result, (when idling):
top - 19:30:46 up 19:24, 3 users, load average: 9.48, 9.12, 8.37
Tasks: 148 total, 1 running, 147 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.3 us, 0.7 sy, 0.0 ni, 99.0 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 508680 total, 480724 used, 27956 free, 268 buffers
KiB Swap: 523708 total, 1180 used, 522528 free, 102272 cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
12386 root 20 0 5440 2580 2212 R 0.5 0.5 0:01.32 top
2735 root 20 0 106m 2680 732 S 0.2 0.5 3:32.63 leafp2p
3317 squeezeb 20 0 117m 94m 2364 S 0.2 19.0 4:18.39 squeezeboxserve
4852 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.2 0.0 0:08.60 kworker/0:1
12369 root 20 0 10416 4724 4084 S 0.2 0.9 0:00.33 sshd
1 root 20 0 7272 2024 480 S 0.0 0.4 0:09.56 systemd
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 kthreadd
All other commands shown had 0% for both CPU and memory.
What do the "load averages" of 9.48, 9.12 and 8.37 actually mean? They seem to be a lot higher than your 0.1 to 0.2.
I tried to explain what the stat means. At any point in time there can be 0-x processes either using the CPU or waiting for their turn to use it. That's the load. The load average is simply the average value of x. The total CPU utilitization is about 1% in your system, even though the load average is much higher.
The new kernel in 6.5.0 might be a factor in my load average being lower than yours. My number in the past was much higher, but I don't recall when that changed.
Are you seeing performance problems?
the app phpsysinfo can give u some info about memory usage and disk smart data
Thanks for the replies, (StephenB - I think that we were both typing posts at about the same time earlier, which may have made it appear that what you had said was not clear?).
Generally performance is good, however as noted in my first post I have one particular concern:
As noted previously I have DVBLink TV Server installed. When opening it up from another device, (Android phone/tablet, PC etc), the first thing that happens is that the Electronic Programme Guide,(EPG), has to populate before you can do anything else: it usually takes over two minutes for this to happen. However when I tried building a server using a "proper" PC, (dual core 2.8GHz 8GB RAM etc), DVBLink was ready to go within 4 seconds! This time delay is what is mainly preventing the rest of the family from using DVBLink "it takes too long to get going". Using Top I have found that for a significant part of this period the CPU seems to be running at 99.9% for this application - I assume that there is nothing that can be done about this?
"phpsysinfo" looks to be very good - just the sort of detail and GUI presentation that I am looking for. Is there and equivalent tool for CPU usage?
I have asked Netgear if they can add some CPU and memeory loading info into the next OS upgrade - I still can't believe that it is not already there!
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