So I am currently running stacer, tbh idk if its working good or not lol. Sometimes my computer still flares up randomly with high CPU usage and the fan going, but I try to use htop to pinpoint, but that tool is probably way more in depth than I know. I’d rather have like maybe a daemon? Or always on app that automatically notices strange things and helps balance out performance, I.e. CPU usage, ram usage, maybe heat?Battery life, overall just to help maintain optimum performance and proper running (I do not game at all BTW, so not a factor)

The three I know of are tlp, auto-cpufreq, and stacer. I’ve read that its not good to run the first two together. Plus I’ve tried tlp numerous times and I feel it made my perfoance worse… I tried the simple default settings and even thoroughly went through and customized the settings, still never seemed to work right. I experimented a little with autocpufreq but had no idea if it was working correctly lol. I mean I followed the basic instructions to set it up, but who knows. Same with stacer; dont know if its really working or if I even configured it right…

In your experiences, what would be the best tool or tools to help me with this. Not really looking for monitors as I have no idea what to do with all that info lol but tools that automatically monitor and make performance tweaks accordingly? Idk if there is an all in one solution or if you need specific apps together, but also need to be aware of possible confliction… Not to mention I set up netdata lol omg I had no clue what I was looking at or how to use it. Super overwhelming because the tool could actually help with network performance but it was so completely confusing. Definitely not for a beginner. Would love your guys suggestions please. Thank you

  • cizra@lemm.ee
    381·
    10 months ago

    Reminds me of the programs that make the kernel drop FS buffers in an attempt to free up RAM. Or hog as much memory as they can in an attempt to have unused things swapped to disk. Yeah, they free up RAM all right, but at the expense of actual speed.

    Most of the time, this junk is actively harmful. Forget it, modern Linux uses optimized defaults.

    You can get more performance out of your hardware by switching to from heavyweight to lightweight programs - for example, instead of Skype (which uses Electron), choose some other way to chat like irssi for IRC. Instead of Gnome, choose i3 or dwm or something like that. You need a bunch of tradeoffs and learning, though, to really get the most out of your hardware.

    • borzthewolf@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      10 months ago

      Thanks. See these are the things I dont know. I pretty much only use the browser on my laptop. I try to keep most things within the browser, but obviously have some apps/tools/programs like bitwarden, vlc, libre word, a textpad, just your basics… The only intensive thing I do on my computed is browsing. Sometimes I’ll get into researching and use the browser heavily, lots of tabs lol or I’ll stream videos I.e. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, whatever… Thats about it. No email, unless I use the browser. I typically use my phone for emailing. I do always try to look for light options as well. But I have zero knowledge of the technical workings under the surface, so I would have no idea how to properly configure certain aspects that may need fixed or configured. If I ever do configure something I either go by the manual or just use settings that I want. Idk I just wanna make sure everything is always properly balanced as possible, but as I’ve explained, I do have many strange issues here and there whether they’re errors, hangs or freezes, slowdowns, overheating, high CPU or ram usage at random times when I’m not using heavily, idk. Linux is a complex system and I dont have the knowledge yet to understand and tweak the inner workings yet. Too confusing and dont know where to start

      • const_void@lemmy.ml
        101·
        10 months ago

        I pretty much only use the browser on my laptop.

        Sounds like you might be better off with something like ChromeOS Flex. It’s optimized to do just that.

      • cizra@lemm.ee
        4·
        10 months ago

        Here’s a couple of pointers to get started:

        1. The Arch Linux Wiki is full of excellent information. It’s not for beginners, though.
        2. Run top in your terminal to see what’s taking CPU.
        3. Run top -o RES (or what’s easier, run top and then press M while it’s running) to see what is taking up RAM.

        … though unfortunately, it’s mighty probable that the only significant consumer of memory and CPU is your browser. Get uBlock Origin, it helps web pages be lighter and eat less resources. Don’t open too many tabs at once - learn to use bookmarks efficiently, instead (folders, bookmarks toolbar and whatnot).

  • throwawayish@lemmy.ml
    11·
    10 months ago

    The issues you’re experiencing are peculiar for sure. Though some of the things you’ve mentioned do ring some bells for me; specifically from the time I was new to Linux and installed a bunch of (random) stuff to get more battery life out of my laptop.

    First of all, unfortunately an all-encompassing software that ensures optimal performance at all times simply does not exist. Your best bet would be running a distro that does a lot of heavy lifting to ensure a good experience regardless of your hardware. So let’s start with a healthy dose of questions to make sure we’re all on the same wavelength:

    • Could you inform us regarding your hardware specifics?
    • What distro do you run?
    • How long ago did you install the distro?
    • Did you ever install software that was not available in the official repositories and is not otherwise delivered as a self-contained package-deal (read: flatpaks, snaps, appimages etc)?
    • Were the issues there from the get-go? Or did you do some things that might have triggered them? And if so, do you have any suspicions on what that something might be?

    P.S. if it isn’t khamzatsmom 🤣🤣. Welcome to the better platform 😉! Btw, I’m not surprised to hear that you’re met with random issues if you continue to run more niche distros for the heck of it 🤣🤣. Sure; you’re free to do whatever you want, but running a sane distro as a start will make a huge difference.

    • borzthewolf@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      10 months ago

      Thanks so much. Wow those are some tricky questions lol. My only computer and main device is my dell xps 13 9310 laptop with Intel i5 evo processor and I think 8 GB of ram. Storage isn’t a concern as I never really store anything and if its important enough, I put it in the cloud. I am currently using linux mint 21.2 with cinnamon desktop.

      I just installed it a few weeks ago because I was using debian 12 bookworm and was having issues with freezing and errors and WiFi problems and I could not successfully troubleshoot them (my only helped is chat gpt lol) so I wiped my drive and installed mint. I’ve been doing this same thing for a while. Swapping distros either due to boredom and curiosity or I break them to the point where idk how to fix it, so I reinstall.

      I believe I have installed apps outside of official repos, sometimes successfully other times not. I try not to do that though. And the big problem is I can’t ever really tell what triggered the issues and a lot of times its hard to pinpoint WHAT is causing the issue and sometimes if I’m lucky, I can narrow it down to a certain thing, but there’s usually a ton of errors and such I find along the way. I do successfully troubleshoot and fix some things, but there’s more complex stuff that is out of my wheelhouse and I usually make things worse in my troubleshooting efforts lol

      • throwawayish@lemmy.ml
        2·
        10 months ago

        Thank you for being quite elaborate!

        dell xps 13 9310 laptop with Intel i5 evo processor and I think 8 GB of ram

        That should be fine.

        I am currently using linux mint 21.2 with cinnamon desktop.

        That should be fine as well.

        I believe I have installed apps outside of official repos, sometimes successfully other times not. I try not to do that though.

        Have you considered installing those apps inside of a container? Distrobox is worth mentioning as it streamlines a lot of this process and even allows one to set a ‘distrobox’ with its own custom HOME directory. It should make experimentation a whole lot less painful, so you should definitely think about it if you haven’t yet.

        I’d argue that if you reinstall Linux Mint with TLP -for what it offers in terms of battery life- and install the exotic packages within a distrobox, then most of your concerns would be resolved. Maintaining a healthier system like that should also decrease the rare bugs that you might be facing right now and thus enable you to run a system over a longer time period.

        If this course of action makes running your distro too boring, then it’s probably worth exploring either Arch or Gentoo as a dualboot alongside Linux Mint. Linux Mint would be used for school/work or whatsoever, while Arch/Gentoo is where all the ‘fun’ happens. Both distros also play a lot nicer with packages not found in the official repos, so they should necessarily offer a better experience.

  • mark
    5·
    10 months ago

    I don’t think you’re going to find a magic program that will just make your computer run faster. If there is a lot of CPU usage, something is using it. try to find out what that is, and either stop the process, wait for it to finish, etc.

    if you have a lot of maintenance tasks that run and take up resources, maybe try and reschedule them for other times of the day?

    • borzthewolf@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      10 months ago

      No no I’m sorry, you guys seem to be misinterpreting things a bit, I’m not really looking for MORE performance because there are obvious hardware limitations, I’m just looking for tools that help optimize what I have to work with. To ensure things are balanced and smooth and running within normal bounds. Trying to enhance I guess health and overall usability. Make sure things aren’t running out of control or consuming more resources than they should. I mean I can look at htop and understand some things, but I by no means know how to use that info to manually configuring things myself, ya know? Just like the many monitoring tools out there, but ones that automatically make adjustments accorsingly, so daemon type programs I guess?

      • mark
        4·
        10 months ago

        I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything like that. Linux doesn’t really need some maintenance app running on top of it to keep it healthy. most of the programs that claim to do the same on windows,. android, etc. don’t really do anything helpful either. If you’ve got a specific issue that keeps popping up, perhaps we can solve it.

        • borzthewolf@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          10 months ago

          Well this is good to know. Even programs such as tlp? It seems like everybody and their mother recommend that one lol

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    4·
    10 months ago

    A long time ago I managed to set up pretty much all temporary files, internet cache files, and even system log files in a tmpfs RAM volume. Made a HUGE difference!

    That last part, putting log files in tmpfs, is not exactly easy though, it requires a startup script to generate all the log directory names, otherwise the system will most likely crash. Plus you lose all system logs after every restart.

    Still, tell ya what, it was worth the effort to me, made things so much faster!

  • HellvolutioN@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    10 months ago

    Are you running Steam with the option to pre-cache Vulkan shaders, by any chance? It usually eats a lot of CPU when you aren’t playing anything on Steam, for some minutes!!!

  • electromage@lemm.ee
    3·
    10 months ago

    Of all the tools you mentioned the only thing I use is tlp on laptops. I’ve never felt the need to run something like stacer, it looks like it claims to do what you’re looking for, beyond that I would just address your specific concerns. If you have a job that’s running periodically that consumes too much CPU maybe you should schedule it for when you are not using the computer, or see if you can throttle it.

    Uninstall apps you’re not using if your laptop is overloaded. Maybe consider a buying a new one if you need more performance or battery life.

    Keep in mind Linux is not Windows and modern Windows doesn’t really need all the “optimization” people think it does anyway.

    What specific issues are you having?

    • borzthewolf@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      10 months ago

      Oh man I’ve done a lot of research on various performance issues and I end up wormholing and getting even more confused. Hence why it would preferably be nice to have tools to do it for me lol. I’ve had many random issues over the years; errors, freezes, overheating, high CPU and/or ram usage when I’m seemingly doing nothing but browsing the web (normal browsing, nothing intensive), overall slow downs or crashes, not to mention WiFi issues. I’ve trouble shot that to death and could never get anywhere so I installed a freaking Ethernet jack the other day in my living room, where I typically use my laptop. I’m just looking for tools to monitor and ensure things are running as they should and to help optimize in real time, so like daemon programs I suppose. Whenever I run into a serious enough issue that I can’t troubleshoot, I just end up wiping my drive and reinstalling a new distro. Thats not the ideal way of troubleshooting haha