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From: vallor <vallor@cultnix.org>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Weird Arch issues
Date: 3 Oct 2024 13:22:30 GMT
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On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 09:07:58 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>
wrote in <vdm4ve$3nuv0$3@dont-email.me>:

> So all was basically hunky-dory on this old ASUS laptop (apart from the
> login issue; I have to go to a virtual console, login there, and run
> startx).
> 
> Looking at the rat's nest of cables in the "office", I powered
> everything down... the router, the interface to AT&T fiber, the MIDI
> devices, the laptop....
> 
> After the cleanup (much nicer), I powered up and logged in. Then came a
> couple of weird issues, and I am not sure why.
> 
> 1. YouTube took forever to open a video, and would not play. I
> reinstalled,
>    renamed the Chromium and Firefox configuration directories, and
>    eventually got them to play. But no sound from YouTube (which would
>    play audio out the laptop speakers.  MPD played fine (through the
>    Behringer USB audio box). Using yt-dlp to download a video from
>    YouTube worked fine, fast as ever.
> 
>    On the Lenovo laptop, no problem. Still at a loss, nothing I've tried
>    works. I disabled all Chrome extensions (Dark Reader and Vimium),
>    nada.
> 
> 2. I wanted to rearrange my music directory and copy it to a USB drive.
>    At about 28Gb, it should have taken around 5 minutes to copy.
>    Instead, it took hours. Not sure if it's a VM issue. Today I copied
>    the music to my Android phone, and it took around 5 minutes.
> 
> At times during the copy from the cheapo SSD to the USB, the system
> would undergo long pauses.
> 
> The output of "sysctl -a | grep dirty":
> 
>     vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10
>     vm.dirty_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000 (5 minutes)
>     vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500
>     vm.dirtytime_expire_seconds = 43200 (!!)
> 
> The setting maintain on the Lenovo.
> 
> Sigh.

Does dmesg -T show anything while trying to play back video?  I've
had a machine throw PCiE retries before, causing unusual behavior
with various peripherals.  Does it have a discrete GPU?  Maybe it
bumped loose.

Also, run free(1) and make sure you didn't lose memory.  Perhaps you
bumped the laptop and had memory unseat.

Certainly sounds like hardware.

-- 
-v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti
   OS: Linux 6.11.0 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G
   "Clairvoyants meeting cancelled due to unforseen events."