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I have an older machine. I've had the impression for a while that despite this fact, it is in fact slower than it used to be, and not just slower than a modern machine.

Yesterday I upgraded to Fedora 39 from Fedora 38, and there was a noticeable performance decrease in a gaming application (Factorio, for reference). To me, this is proof that it's not just in my head.

I'm a bit at a loss for what to investigate.

Output of atop shows that DSK is occasionally reaching 94% load, and output of iostat returns the following :

iostat
Linux 6.5.11-300.fc39.x86_64 (fedora.home)      11/11/23        _x86_64_        (12 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           2.99    0.02    1.08   19.55    0.00   76.35

Device             tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_dscd/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn    kB_dscd
sda               0.19         5.66         0.00         0.00       6280          0          0
sdb             141.68      2218.36       824.05     26156.63    2462739     914829   29038048
zram0             0.05         1.06         0.00         0.00       1176          4          0

(sdb is boot and filesystem, sda is just data) The large amount of discards/s is a reasonable place to look, but smartctl -t long returned zero errors. I don't know enough about hard drive debugging to look further.

Finally, a hard drive issue shouldn't have gotten significantly worse after a system upgrade, would it have?

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5
  • Probably not the issue, if any other than your perception, but you want to check graphics drivers (applicable to Nvidia) that may not have proper support yet for your current kernel version. Also it may now reading/writing more data and HDDs shouldn't be used nowadays for OS/Software (still fine for personal files, multimedia, etc.) That being the case you want to consider upgrading to a SSD.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 0:49
  • Awesome. Well, is there a flag I can set somewhere to use hdd optimized operations? Or are hdds actually depreciated for boot disks in modern distros?
    – Mumbles
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 10:08
  • You may check /sys/block/sdX/queue/rotational. Unless the drive is behind an enclosure / adapter (i.e., USB HDD), the OS should be able to detect it correctly. (You should see 1 for HDDs.)
    – Tom Yan
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 10:14
  • Yes, output of cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational is 1.
    – Mumbles
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 10:38
  • HDDs have been deprecated a long time ago for ANY OS. Windows is painfully slow if installed even in a good 7200rpm drive.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Nov 12, 2023 at 14:52

2 Answers 2

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Since op mentioned gaming performance, I'd like to address another possible cause for the performance drop that I encountered during my investigation. This may help future readers whose problem may not be related to disk performance at all.

I had a problem with low framerate and occasional temporary freeze while gaming. In my case, the power saver was turned on. So I had to switch to either performance mode or balanced mode to make the stuttering go away. If you are using Gnome, then simply go to Settings>Power then select Performance or Balanced.

screenshot of power settings

If you have a hybrid graphics system you also wanna check if you are running your game with discrete graphics. Simply right click on the executable and select Run using dedicated graphics. You also need to make sure if you have the right driver installed for your discrete graphics card before that.

Since I'm using nVidia graphics card with Xorg on gnome, I had nvidia-gpu-firmware, nvidia-settings and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia package installed. The rest of the packages shown below were dependencies installed by the package manager.

$ dnf list --installed | grep nvidia
akmod-nvidia.x86_64                                  3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
kmod-nvidia-6.6.7-200.fc39.x86_64.x86_64             3:545.29.06-1.fc39                  @@commandline                   
kmod-nvidia-6.6.8-200.fc39.x86_64.x86_64             3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @@commandline                   
nvidia-gpu-firmware.noarch                           20231211-1.fc39                     @updates                        
nvidia-modprobe.x86_64                               3:545.29.06-1.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
nvidia-persistenced.x86_64                           3:545.29.06-1.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
nvidia-settings.x86_64                               3:545.29.06-1.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.x86_64                           3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda.x86_64                      3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs.i686                   3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs.x86_64                 3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-kmodsrc.x86_64                   3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686                        3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64                      3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power.x86_64                     3:545.29.06-2.fc39                  @rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
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Replacing the system drive with an SSD seems to have resolved the issue.

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