antiX 21 sluggish compared to antiX 19

[Member lgj100]

Hi Everyone,

Having now run antiX 21 (full) for a while, I find it is sluggish compared with antiX 19. My setup of antiX 21 is pretty much the same as I had with antix 19 and on the same hardware. The only difference is that antix 19 was the base version install. Videos in 21 are choppy, with delays, as is sometimes audio. And sometimes typing email in the browser results in delayed typing.

Is there a big difference between base and full in this respect, and would it help if I install base 21 instead of full 21?

Sincerely,
Lars.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.

[Member oparun]

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lgj100 wrote:

Videos in 21 are choppy

what video player do you use?
what version?
have you tried to upgrade from debian multimedia?
have you tried to upgrade from bullseye backports?

[Member Xecure]

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inxi -SGxxx

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member lgj100]

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Hi,

I only watch videos through my browser, the same browsers I used on antix 19 – either Brave, Vivaldi. Never had a problem with the same videos through the same browsers on antiX 19. Same internet setup.

$ inxi -SGxxx
System:
Host: bach Kernel: 5.10.57-antix.1-amd64-smp x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
v: 10.2.1 Desktop: IceWM 2.9.2 vt: 7 dm: N/A
Distro: antiX-21_x64-full Grup Yorum 31 October 2021
base: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics
vendor: Lenovo ThinkPad T420 driver: i915 v: kernel bus-ID: 00:02.0
chip-ID: 8086:0126 class-ID: 0300
Device-2: Chicony integrated camera type: USB driver: uvcvideo
bus-ID: 1-1.6:4 chip-ID: 04f2:b221 class-ID: 0e02
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: modesetting
unloaded: fbdev,vesa resolution: 1366×768~60Hz s-dpi: 96
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel HD Graphics 3000 (SNB GT2)
v: 3.3 Mesa 20.3.5 compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes

Sincerely,
Lars.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.

[Member oparun]

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Maybe try turning GPU acceleration off.

[Member lgj100]

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Hi again,

Turning off hardware acceleration seems to help. Thanks!

This is a 2012 laptop. Is it generally recommended to turn off hardware acceleration in browsers when running older hardware?

Sincerely,
Lars.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.

[Member oparun]

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You didn’t tell the quality of the video you’re watching? 1080p and higher or lower?
Intel built-in video isn’t a very good option. Sure, you can use it for some time but the web is getting fatter so quickly, so you need something more powerful (gpu) to browse through it without any hardware hiccups.
And the last thing: we’re talking about hungry – hungry chrome – clone browser. If you want to use it you’ll need something more powerful, more uptodate than your 2012 pc. At least according to my experience this statement is true.

Try to move into youtube-dl/mpv territory or get yourself a plugin for, let’s say firefox browser to download videos and watch them locally.

[Member ModdIt]

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On a 2012 Laptop I would recommend watching videos with anything other than the browser, it is a very heavy application.
SM tube or ytfzf if you use use an alias tap in yt then search.
create then ~/.bash_aliases
add alias yt=’ytfzf’

[Moderator caprea]

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These thinkpads T420 are older but still capable.
Delayed typing etc should not actually occur.
Might try another kernel, the same as on antiX19.
You could also see if it helps to use the intel video driver instead of modesetting.
Here’s a good How To for that.
https://mxlinux.org/wiki/hardware/intel-video-driver/
I have good experience on older laptops with the intel driver.

[Member violet_spark]

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we have a thinkpad x220 and t420. Here is the Device section from our /etc/X11/xorg.conf config that we have configured for the intel graphics on these laptops which might be helpful. took awhile to nail down all the specifics to get it working best as possible.

We also use this with the compositor picom to get good vsync working (optional). It may seem unintuitive but setting “TearFree” to “true” causes a whole lot of trouble both with and without a compositor for these graphics.

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Card0"
	Driver      "intel"
	Option      "AccelMethod"     "sna"
	Option	    "TearFree"        "false"
	Option      "TripleBuffer"    "false"
	Option      "SwapbuffersWait" "true"
	Option      "DRI"             "3"
EndSection

We do still have lag sometimes watching video in browser though. It’s usually not enough to be a big problem for most kinds of videos, but because of that we use mpv with a browser plugin called ff2mpv that adds a “open in mpv” button to the right click menu on videos. mpv also lets us add a gamma correction curve to video playback so it looks less washed out on the TN panel we have.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by violet_spark.

[Member olsztyn]

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lgj100 wrote:

Having now run antiX 21 (full) for a while, I find it is sluggish compared with antiX 19. My setup of antiX 21 is pretty much the same as I had with antix 19 and on the same hardware. The only difference is that antix 19 was the base version install. Videos in 21 are choppy, with delays, as is sometimes audio. And sometimes typing email in the browser results in delayed typing.

Regardless of the recommended tweaks and workarounds (which may help) it is worthwhile to identify the cause why on antiX 19 video playback performance is good and on antiX 21 it is sluggish. Although I doubt it is something between base and full composition, it is important to nail down the cause.
I would be glad to test in order to make antiX 21 perform as expected, but I am not able to re-produce video sluggish performance on antiX 21, perhaps because I am not using Firefox. So far I have been playing just Youtube videos in Chrome/Chromium browser, as well as in SMTube redirecting to MPV. What would be the best reference video scenario to re-produce this issue?
Laptops I am using for this are T410 running antiX 21 Runit, machine almost the same as T420…

Update:
Out of curiosity I just installed Firefox and tested playback of the same Youtube video I was using before. I have not noticed any sluggishness or any difference, so it might be I will need to test on much higher resolution.
This test does not help the originally reported experience that playback performance is sluggish under antiX 21 and was fine under antiX 19. I may need to find a high res video to re-produce the same experience and perform such test both on antiX 21 and antiX 19…
Another difference in hardware is that my Thinkpad T410 has nVidia but is using Nuveau driver in antiX 21. Could this difference be that I do not seem to be able to re-produce sluggishness? I will try to redo test on Intel based T410, in case this makes a difference…
Any suggestions will be appreciated…

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by olsztyn.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Member lgj100]

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Hi olsztyn,

Well, my sluggish experience was not with Firefox. I did not try Firefox. Perhaps performance is better with Firefox than with the two browsers I have been using, Vivaldi and Brave, and they behaved similarly sluggish initially. Things has improved after I turned off hardware acceleration and perhaps also because I have been using the xorg.conf snippet in this thread, above.

If you want to try my original setup, try those browsers, and turn hardware acceleration on, and use the default xorg.conf. It will defiitely be interesting to know whether Firefox performs better.

Sincerely,
Lars.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by lgj100.

[Member oparun]

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You can also try the latest Waterfox browser (is a fork of Firefox), it runs smooth on core2 – era hardware and its recent release supports apulse (and Firefox 95 doesn’t)

Here’s the repo
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Ahawkeye116477%3Awaterfox&package=waterfox-classic-kpe

[Member starnutter]

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On a default installation of 19.4 or 17.4, video lag becomes very noticeable on a Pentium 4-M cpu, 500MB ram system or lower laptop when playing MP4 files.

The picture will lag behind the audio. But, if you install VLC media player, video playback will be synchronised and play fine – meaning that VLC must be taking advantage of some kind of optimisation not present in the default setup.

MP4 is a container for various video and audio formats. If the MP4 file or stream contains VP9 video (the default youtube video format) then the aforementioned P4-M may struggle because VP9 is biased towards newer, more powerful cpus and/or gpus.

If a web browser supports it then just modify the settings for the browser to request video content not containing VP9 video and also increase the buffering.

[Member lgj100]

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Hi again,

This slowdown problem seems to be considerably worse after starting up from suspend. Any ideas how to avoid this other than not using suspend? I have included my hardware info below.

Sincerely,
Lars.

System: Kernel: 5.10.57-antix.1-amd64-smp x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 10.2.1
parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.57-antix.1-amd64-smp
root=UUID=6116b23f-d3ee-4f8c-956a-f9aaf4a3f5ff ro
Desktop: IceWM 2.9.2 vt: 7 dm: N/A Distro: antiX-21_x64-full Grup Yorum 31 October 2021
base: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Machine: Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 4177RVU v: ThinkPad T420 serial: <filter> Chassis:
type: 10 serial: <filter>
Mobo: LENOVO model: 4177RVU serial: <filter> UEFI-[Legacy]: LENOVO v: 83ET82WW (1.52 )
date: 06/04/2018
Battery: ID-1: BAT0 charge: 40.7 Wh (100.0%) condition: 40.7/47.5 Wh (85.7%) volts: 12.0
min: 10.8 model: LGC 45N1005 type: Li-ion serial: <filter> status: Full
Memory: RAM: total: 7.66 GiB used: 3.36 GiB (43.9%)
RAM Report: permissions: Unable to run dmidecode. Root privileges required.
PCI Slots: Permissions: Unable to run dmidecode. Root privileges required.
CPU: Info: Dual Core model: Intel Core i5-2450M bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Sandy Bridge
family: 6 model-id: 2A (42) stepping: 7 microcode: 2F cache: L2: 3 MiB bogomips: 19935
Speed: 797 MHz min/max: 800/3100 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 797 2: 797 3: 797 4: 797
Flags: acpi aes aperfmperf apic arat arch_perfmon avx bts clflush cmov constant_tsc
cpuid cx16 cx8 de ds_cpl dtes64 dtherm dts epb ept est flexpriority flush_l1d fpu fxsr
ht ibpb ibrs ida lahf_lm lm mca mce md_clear mmx monitor msr mtrr nonstop_tsc nopl nx
pae pat pbe pcid pclmulqdq pdcm pebs pge pln pni popcnt pse pse36 pti pts rdtscp sep
ssbd sse sse2 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 stibp syscall tm tm2 tpr_shadow tsc
tsc_deadline_timer vme vmx vnmi vpid x2apic xsave xsaveopt xtopology xtpr
Vulnerabilities: Type: itlb_multihit status: KVM: VMX disabled
Type: l1tf mitigation: PTE Inversion; VMX: conditional cache flushes, SMT vulnerable
Type: mds mitigation: Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable
Type: meltdown mitigation: PTI
Type: spec_store_bypass
mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp
Type: spectre_v1 mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Full generic retpoline, IBPB: conditional, IBRS_FW, STIBP:
conditional, RSB filling
Type: srbds status: Not affected
Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected
Graphics: Device-1: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics
vendor: Lenovo ThinkPad T420 driver: i915 v: kernel bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:0126
class-ID: 0300
Device-2: Chicony integrated camera type: USB driver: uvcvideo bus-ID: 1-1.6:4
chip-ID: 04f2:b221 class-ID: 0e02
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: intel display-ID: :0.0 screens: 1
Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1366×768 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 361x203mm (14.2×8.0″)
s-diag: 414mm (16.3″)
Monitor-1: LVDS1 res: 1366×768 hz: 60 dpi: 112 size: 310x170mm (12.2×6.7″)
diag: 354mm (13.9″)
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel HD Graphics 3000 (SNB GT2) v: 3.3 Mesa 20.3.5
compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes
Audio: Device-1: Intel 6 Series/C200 Series Family High Definition Audio vendor: Lenovo
driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1b.0 chip-ID: 8086:1c20 class-ID: 0403
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.10.57-antix.1-amd64-smp running: yes
Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 14.2 running: no
Network: Device-1: Intel 82579LM Gigabit Network vendor: Lenovo ThinkPad T520 driver: e1000e
v: kernel port: 5080 bus-ID: 00:19.0 chip-ID: 8086:1502 class-ID: 0200
IF: eth0 state: down mac: <filter>
Device-2: Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 [Condor Peak] driver: iwlwifi v: kernel
modules: wl port: efa0 bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 8086:0084 class-ID: 0280
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>
IP v4: <filter> scope: global broadcast: <filter>
IP v6: <filter> scope: link
WAN IP: <filter>

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