Detailed. PC gets very warm/hot fast viewing flash

[slixz85]

hows it goin guy's. this is something that is starting to bug me as i don't want to move to arch and it has kept me from doing a few things like playing flash games and watching videos. My PC not laptop gets very warm real fast when using debian and ubuntu derivatives. i have tested on nearly 10 different distros. even the ones installed to my machine do it so not a live cd issue. Once I open a browser and go to a flash game website sometimes i can play it for about 1-2minutes until i hear the computer start working harder (i hear the fan speed up believe anyway it starts soundin like it is takin off on a drag strip lol) the fan is fine it seems i have replaced a few before over the years and it is not making any wierd spinning noises it is very fluid. the cpu works not even at 100 percent below it about 90. i have decreased swapiness from 60 to 10 as well. i dont know if this would matter but i know it does improve performance sometimes. also i can play games that demand more than flash like warzone 0ad etc and they do not nearly do this at all. the PC is calm still and operating warm not really warm and hot.
besides this like i was gettin at in archbang i have no issue whatsoever i just do not want to make that move to have to learn everything again. it was a headache just tryin out the livecd. I also installed archbang and it worked fine still. buti quickly uninstalled it because of the learning curve. i am sure it is simple for some but i am not ready for it. so this is extremely wierd how archbang is the only 1 system i have came across that fixes this issue.
so all i can think of is maybe some kind of specs of archbang i need to compare with debian/ubuntu distro's but i am unaware of where to look at all for this problem and wouldn't know the next step anyway. someone in irc mentioned this before that maybe arch tweaks something that works better with my pc. (or of course a flash issue but why would 10 different distro's all have the same flash version. they don't. so not sure) . and it is not working hard because only my 1gig ram is full. i have a minimal desktop and with flash open and running i still have about 700mb free

here are my computer specs in case it could help. (sorry not full specs though quick search i didnt find them) http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,20 ... ?tab=Specs this may not be my exact model but the picture looks like it and the video card is 6100 and also it is an amd athlon dual core 3800 pro. other similar models had intel for some reason

thanks for your time

[machinebacon]

Can you please post:

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lspci -nnk |grep VGA
uname -r

just to make sure which the exact video device number is and the kernel. Let's see first.

[slixz85]

lspci -nnk |grep VGA
00:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation C51G [GeForce 6100] [10de:0242] (rev a2)

3.2.0-4-686-pae (of course other kernels also do this)

thanks for quick response

[slixz85]

i am not sure of exact codes from terminal to use for arch if would all be the same or not. but i can reburn a flash iso and get any codes from archbang that could be useful as well in comparing
appreciate it to machine and any who help

[machinebacon]

It's okay, thanks. I wonder if 'all kernels do this' is really 100% accurate. There are partly huge differences between kernels, especially custom kernels like for example slh, towo, liquorix, ck.

If you dare (it's not a technical difficulty) try the liquorix kernel for a comparison. If you run Sid, try the slh kernel from aptosid or the towo kernel from siduction

(our own BBQ kernel is 64bit only ATM, developed for the Rocks! release with strict preemption, but you use 32bit so no alternative yet)

Another idea is running the smxi script (http://smxi.org) and get some other kernels with it. I am pretty sure it is a kernel issue.

[machinebacon]

One more thing: you have 1GB RAM, so you should better not use a PAE kernel. (check your uname output)

And one more: do you use nouveau or the nvidia blob drivers?

[slixz85]

ok. what exactly does pae mean? and i may be wrong so gonna redownload a non-pae iso and see if same problem but i believe this existed before i went to pae. i just started using pae cause my computer was capable of it and all and thought it was better. so what does it mean about 1gig ram with pae then? it just uses more resources? i really dont know what pae is compared to non-pae. and i typically use the nvidia 173 as it has better support for the 6100 i read but i have also tried the current drivers

[slixz85]

i shall try the other above liquorix kernel as well. i didnt catch that thread my gmail jumped me to only seeing last reply. this is a very wierd issue though cause i am sure that my pc fan and video card are fine

[machinebacon]

Different kernels are optimized for different tasks. I have, for example, better results in virtualization with towo kernels than with slh. The liquorix kernels are known to be optimized for video/graphics rendering (IIRC) and the Debian vanilla kernels are, well, vanilla. There are some kernels that use strict realtime, it means they reserve slices for tasks to finish in a given time and don't allow interupting. This can be controlled through NICE values.
The PAE means physical address extension and is most probably 'supported' by the CPU. But that's more due to the fact that Windows supports it and thus the label "supports PAE" sells well on the PC. What they don't tell you is that PAE is an optimization for computers with >4GB and <64GB RAM, and that this range can usually not be catered with non-PAE kernels. I have read many, many reviews, reports and observations that users of non-PAE kernels on low-RAM computers found an increase in performance. YMMV.

[slixz85]

Just updating a bit. I have tried other kernels including the liquorix kernel and it didn't seem to fix the issue. I meant to about a week ago to download archbang again and see what all it was running. If i do this sometime in next couple of days since I don't want to install it right now unless I have to learn the arch way better to be able to watch videos/games and such on my other partition (which is what i would only use it for). what else should i pay attention to besides the kernel and maybe are there a couple other quick terminal inputs to use and copy? thanks

[rhowaldt]

just looked a bit into Flash myself today, and you could have a try tweaking the settings maybe. check /etc/adobe/mms.cfg (if it ain't there, create it). here's a file from the Gentoo community that is nicely documented: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewv ... es/mms.cfg
links to further documentation (Adobe's own, where they got this from) inside the comments of the file.

there are also one other setting not mentioned in the Gentoo version:

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EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

you could try that out, either on or off whichever works best, and also the option

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OverrideGPUValidation = 1

either on or off. read about people having better luck with combinations of these settings. on my own install, keeping both off seems to cause the least CPU usage.
experiment.
good luck :)

[machinebacon]

thanks rho, this looks good. It is supposedly the same thing like 'right click into the flash player and disbale hardware acceleration'

@op: you could indeed log the temperature on different kernels. it's actually enough for me to know which kernel version is cooler, then i can look into the settings, compare and eventually roll our own 686 kernel as alternative. it doesn't hurry, by the way :)

[slixz85]

thank you rho and machine for your inputs. i didnt even think about the hardware acceleration and all. i will do this real soon and repost by tonight to let know if it fixed the problem. in a way i hope it aint this simple lol. something so simple may have just got overlooked if not i will let u guys know.

[machinebacon]

you can also try to enable html5 in youtube and see if this chills down the grill...

[rhowaldt]

@bacon: those settings can indeed be done from the GUI-settings-stuff you mentioned before, forgot about those. however, i like the clarity and simplicity of a config file, plus that extra Linux-bla option isn't available i believe, you need to use another program/plugin for it, Flash-Aid Wizard. here's my source: http://r3dux.org/2011/12/how-to-partial ... -on-linux/

i repeated much of what he says, simply experiment with the settings until you get something better... or not :)

edit: so what i did myself was copy over that Gentoo file, then add this:

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# Allows Flash to use the vdpau backend for hardware acceleration.
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 0

can't hurt to have a file there anyway :)