My wife’s HP 6570p laptop is running with a Crucial 2TB SSD, but is beginning to act very sluggishly, and throws errors into the dmesg about BTRFS. I checked her SSD directly with my machine (USB-Sata dongle), and no problems, including full SMART self test.
With respect to temperatures, you can use either of these commands to get some details:
Storage specific:
inxi -Dxx --za
All sensors:
sensors
How much space do you have free?
df -h
There are also two BTRFS specific processes you can run. These are detailed in the Wiki under Scrub and Balance. These can take a long time, so keep that in mind before commencing.
The btrfs scrub command re-checks data, re-calculating the checksums and comparing it against the stored values. Essentially, it validates data, checking for corruption.
sudo btrfs scrub start /some/mount/point
That’ll start running in the background, and will likely take quite a while. To check it’s progress, you replace start with status:
sudo btrfs scrub status /some/mount/point
The next tool is balance. This sends all file-system data to the allocator again, which on a single-device file-system (ie: not using RAID) can help fix “file system full” issues. It does a bit more than that on RAID setups (regenerates the RAID).
sudo btrfs balance start --bg /some/mount/point
That’ll start in the background. To check in on its status, run:
The processor in your wife’s HP is 13 years old, so it’s on the dated side. A degree of sluggishness is to be expected, particularly under more modern desktop environments.
But of note, my wife’s NUC is using a newer (2015) but only slightly lower spec Intel i3-6100U (UserBenchmark i5-3210M vs i3-6100U). We had KDE Plasma on that system initially and it was painfully sluggish. I’m not experienced with Cinnamon, but from what I understand, it’s demand on resources isn’t markedly different to KDE.
A super lightweight desktop environment suitable for these older systems would be something like LXQt, which is generally regarded as perhaps the lightest option. This breathed new life into my wife’s old NUC. The only downside is it’s nowhere near as visually polished as KDE Plasma, nor Cinnamon I expect. It feels a bit clunky by comparison, although very performant.
The other common options for lightweight desktop environment are XFCE and LXDE, which may better suit anyway given existing familiarity with a GTK based desktop environment.
I’m just an amateur user of btrfs but judging by what you show it doesn’t look good.
You could run the check and post back the result here for getting an assessment from the experts on the matter or just format, reinstall and restore backup data.
As far as I know, the --repair option is advised against. It must be done after a thorough analysis of the problem by experts. Even so it could lead to data loss.
If I’m not mistaken, an assisted BTRFS install will also default enable compression. That’s good if you want to improve storage space and reduce SSD writes, and on systems where I/O is slow but CPU is decent, it can actually increase speed. On your wife’s system though, it could potentially be slowing things down.
Booted to a Cachyos live usb, on her machine, run the btrfsck, and no errors found…hmmm
going to do it anyway. Currently copying @ and @home parts of the btrfs system to external ext4 disk.
Then I will boot into her system and follow this recipe:
To restore Arch Linux packages on a fresh reload using Yay, you can follow these steps. First, ensure you have a list of explicitly installed packages from your previous installation using the command pacman -Qqe > packages.txt . This command will create a file named packages.txt containing all the native and AUR packages that were explicitly installed. To restore these packages, you can use the command yay -S --needed --nouseask --nocleanmenu --nodiffmenu --removemake - < ~/packages.txt . This command will install the necessary packages from the list, skipping those already installed, and minimizing user interaction during the process.
I suspect because the system is so elderly, the overhead of cinnamon and the btrfs with compression is too much to bear. Will do xfce4 and ext4.
I wouldn’t say btrfs is a bad option, still. The checksumming and snapshotting has the potential to get one out of a bad situation, whether it’s recovery from data corruption, a bad update, or restoring potentially lost data.
The compression aspect of btrfs is adjustable. See Btrfs Compression for how to adjust or disable that, and apply those changes to existing files.
Reporting back on my adventures:
I backed it up. I wiped the laptop SSD. I loaded the OS to the SSD.
I had a spare linuxmint PC sitting idle, so I set it up, SATA connected, with the backup drive ( a 3TB platter ) and the 2TB SSD, and used Thunar to copy from 3TB back to the SSD. It was unbelievably slow, averaging <1mb/s transfer rates on a 650GB dataset. It was going to be days.
“strange,” said I, and so for giggles tried Midnight Commander instead. Boom. Averaging 25mb/s.
So that was fun learning experience. Mrs Wabbit’s machine is now a heap faster, running on EXT4, with CachyOs, and XFCE.
Thanks all.
