Librem 15 (PureOS) becomes sluggish after closing/opening lid

[curumimxara]

I’ve been experiencing this for a while now and I don’t even know how to really trace the issue. Sometimes when I close the lid of my Librem 15 and open it again later, the OS becomes very slow – mainly when using browsers (Firefox, Chrome, PureBrowser). But it’s not just a little bit slow, it’s painfully slow. I can write whole paragraphs without seeing anything in the screen and a few seconds later they all appear at the same time. It’s like I’m using a Pentium IV, but in fact I’m running Librem 15 with 16 GB of RAM.

I’ve been monitoring CPU usage with htop and whenever I open a tab in Firefox the CPU goes to 90% and stay there for a few seconds. I tried PureBrowser and it has the same behavior. But this only happens when I close and re-open the laptop’s lid.

I love the hardware, but right now I have to close all my work and reboot the system every time I close my laptop lid, and since I’m constantly in the move this is becoming a painful experience.

[purism121]

I wonder if this is related to the constant high fan speed after waking from sleep? Perhaps the high fan speed and your slow browser are symptoms of something in PureOS working too hard.

[hazybluedot]

Agree with @purism121, this sounds like it could be related to this issue. When this happens for me I’ve noticed that the CPU frequency is pegged at 400Mhz. Next time you wake up the system and it seems slow open up a terminal window and run

watch grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo

and note what the values are around. If they’re around 400MHz it’s not sluggish because PureOS is working too hard, but because the CPU isn’t allowed to run at its full speed.

[nicole.faerber]

We (Purism) noticed this too and investigate the root cause. Current workaround is to suspend and resume a second time. This usually resolves the issue.
We suspect that the root cause might be a bug in thermal management. Some component after resume seems to detect a overheat situation which then causes the fan to run at 100% and also throttles the CPU. The overheat is pretty obviously wrong. We are not sure yet which component (hardware, Coreboot, Linux) causes this. We will update you once we found the issue.

Cheers
nicole

[sboresch]

Nicole,

thank you for acknowledging this officially!! This problem has been observed in at least two other threads,

Purism power optimisations service fails after recent update

OK, so the CPU frequency issue is confirmed – this was reported on yet another thread, where I got the idea in the first place. Question: has Purism taken note of the issue? Has anyone reported an issue / opened a support ticket? I grant them that this may be the fallout from some kernel regressions etc.; on the other hand, they control both the software and hardware; it also seems like something that is easy to reproduce on the newer Librems. Thanks, Stefan

and

Fan full blast after sleep, coreboot and Intel ME

Hmm, good to know. My librem is my only machine right now; didn’t realize there were wider performance issues. Strange that we have similar issues with different sequences. I guess I’ll keep monitoring the threads and work with what I’ve got.

May I suggest that Purism opens a main thread in which progress /
things to try are posted (or points the other threads to this one!) – thanks!!!

Best,

Stefan

PS: For the record, my laptop 13v3 is very recent and had the
latest corebios installed. I definitely did not encounter overheating/shutdowns as discussed between Jan-Mar here, but the stuck fan / low CPU frequency struck immediately. And, alas, I have the problem 4 out 5 tries opening the lid.
PPS: I really hope this is a software issue on some level!