A way to speed up rendering large files?

[SumBloke]

I'm trying to re-index a large database and it is taking ages. A look at the sytem monitor shows that the process is only using 5% of the CPU. There is disk activity of about 1.5mb/sec which doesnt seem high enough to slow everything down to a crawl
Is there a way to run this more efficiently? Perhaps a switch to use when launching the program via the terminal?

Thanks

[GreyGeek]

Run ksysguard (the system monitor). Use the Processes tab. Right mouse on the process you want to speed up. In the dialog chose "Set priority". Or, you can read the man pages for the nice command.

SYNOPSIS nice [OPTION] [COMMAND [ARG]...]


DESCRIPTION
Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling. With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Niceness values range
from -20 (most favorable to the process) to 19 (least favorable to the process).


Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.


-n, --adjustment=N
add integer N to the niceness (default 10)

I don't know if the process you want to speed up can be run from the command line.

[whatthefunk]

What kind of database is it?

[wizard10000]

I think the first thing to do would be to determine whether the bottleneck is processor, memory or I/O. My favorite tool for this is glances and it should be in every Linux repo out there.

glances will tell you in human-readable terms whether the problem is processor, memory or disk and it's a handy tool to have in your toolkit. I quit using top and htop years ago; glances has a nice ncurses interface and puts everything on one screen. Give it a try and after we figure out where the bottleneck is we can figure out what to do about it

protip: When troubleshooting performance issues the component running at 100% capacity is the bottleneck. It's a rule

[GreyGeek]

Wow! I've run Linux since 1998 and your post is the first I've read about "glances". Linux is just an amazing treasure chest of jewels!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[wizard10000]

Wow! I've run Linux since 1998 and your post is the first I've read about "glances". Linux is just an amazing treasure chest of jewels!

That it is. I believe glances is a port of 'glance', which is an HP-UX tool. First time I saw it was when someone ssh'd into an HP Superdome and ran it and I thought it was so cool I searched for it in Linux and got lucky

[jlittle]

I believe glances is a port of 'glance', which is an HP-UX tool.

Cool, I didn't know about that.
I've used glance to great effect on HP-UX. One occasion could have been solved with lsof and grep but you had to know where to look; a production problem for many months solved by me in half an hour after I was asked to look at it, because I knew how to use glance.

Regards, John Little

[wizard10000]

...a production problem for many months solved by me half an hour after I was asked to look at it, because I knew how to use glance.

I used glances just yesterday. Was tweaking a backup script that rsyncs to both local and network drives and knew pretty much exactly where I was in the script by just watching I/O switch from local disk to network and back. Handy little tool

[SumBloke]

Thanks for the glances tip. Looks like just the tool

My process is still running! at about 80% so I think Ill wait it out now!

Do you think it would be safe to install glances and run it while the process is still running?

[wizard10000]

...Do you think it would be safe to install glances and run it while the process is still running?

Sure you can - glances doesn't take much in the way of resources.