Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

[devnulljp]

Upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04 and it feels really sluggish since the upgrade.
Anyone else?
Thinkpad T500 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 4 GB RAM should be fine. Ran great under 9.10.
Contemplating a clean install to see if that helps any.

[Rob_H]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

Check the process list (CTRL+ESC) and see if "nepomukservices" is responsible. If so, it should get better once the initial indexing is complete. You can also disable indexing by going to System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Search and uncheck "Enable Strigi Desktop File Indexer".

[gshockxc]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

That helped. Thanks, but it still seems slow.
Specifically, it's simple things, like bringing up Dolphin after browsing a web page. Or minimizing one application to work in another. The windows move slowly. Another example is when I went to the Ubuntu and Kubuntu pages, and the graphics on the page loaded extremely slowly.

[drooghead]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

Try disabling the blur effect.
System Settings-->Desktop Effects-->All Effects-->Blur

[gshockxc]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

I don't have Blur in the effects. I disabled some of the ones I don't want. So it's a little better.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

I find that from time to time conflicts in config files can appear - this can often manifest itself after a kde upgrade and result in a less than responsive desktop.

Try renaming the following hidden folder

/home/.kde/share/config

(Rename it so that if there is no improvement you can change it back)

Logout then back in (or reboot). You will be presented with a virgin desktop, and when you run all your kde apps it will be as if you are running them for the first time. Hopefully that will sort it, but if not maybe you should be looking at the graphics.

HTH

ian

[bai.ganga]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

I have Pentium-4 desktop with 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM and 40 GB HDD. I have dual boot with Win-XP given 3 partitions (total 34 GB) and rest for Kubuntu (of which 1 GB is swap space). I had to go in for some hardware repairs after which, I had installed in that manner about a month ago. Before the repairs to the hardware as I mentioned, the installation was almost with the same configuration but at that time the RAM in the system was only 256 MB.

The original Kubuntu was version 9.04 which I chose never to upgrade but available updates were applied. After the hardware repairs, I again installed same 9.04 and ran for some time. Both Kubuntu and Windows had become considerably faster (due upgrade of RAM from 256 MB to 1 GB ?). However, I found that media (both Amarok and Dragon players) were not playing at all and I found that difficult to rectify. After about three weeks of operating like that, I upgraded Kubuntu to version 9.10 and then to 10.04 in a day. I was able to rectify the problem with the media players but the start up, opening of closing of each windows and each such process seems to have considerably slowed down after the upgrade (I did not operate with version 9.10 to check if there was a slow down at that stage). Although I have been using Kubuntu for nearly three years in a status as explained above, I still need to use windows-XP sometimes and I am not yet ready to completely do away with windows. I don't even want to make any changes to the partition as I have made during the installation because I want that much space for the data which is accessible from both windows and Kubuntu.

I tried uncheck "Enable Strigi Desktop File Indexer" as given below and found that it was already in the unchecked condition.

Then I looked into System Settings-->Desktop Effects-->All Effects-->Blur and found that the "all effects" portion is already dim. That is, in the "general" tab, the "enable desktop effects" is unchecked. Should I do something else here (?)

I did not understand the procedure enumerated by The Liquidator here. A bit of explanation about that please

[Snowhog]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

bai.ganga and devnulljp -

Please tell us about the graphics card/chip set you have in your rigs. The issues you are describing are almost certainly graphics driver issues.

[bai.ganga]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

Dear Snowhog,

Thank you very much for your response. My current problem is only this much: Start up of Linux, opening and closing of each document or media and each such process seems to have considerably slowed down after the upgrade to 10.04 (I did not operate with version 9.10 to check if there was a slow down at that stage) compared to how it was with kubuntu 9.04. And, my desktop is an old one . . . about seven years plus. I know it has a Pentium-4 processor with a speed of 2 GHz, 1GB DDR-1 RAM and 40 GB hard disk. How do I look for the details of graphics card/chipset? I really don't know this aspect.

[bai.ganga]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

One more thing that I suspect. During the start-up, the GRUB loader shows three versions of Linux and the Win-XP. From here, I am able to start only the latest version of Kubuntu or the Win-XP only. If I try to start any other version of Kubuntu (all have been renamed to 10.04 with some other numbers attached to it), Linux does not start and some error message comes up. So, I also feel that probably some of the files applicable for the versions 9.04 and 9.10 still exist in the system Can I do something to remove these?

I clearly remember that during the upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 and also from there to 10.04, before the downloads started, some message stated that some (about 400 to 600) files are going to be upgraded and some others (about 50 to 100) are going to be removed from the system and I had said OK to this message. So, I do hope all unnecessary files should have been removed?

Could it be due to too less disk space that I had allotted to Kubuntu? I had given a little more than 5 GB in ext-3 format for (/) and about 750 MB as Swap space. If this could be the problem, is there any way that I can rectify this by taking out some space out of a partition of about 8 GB which is currently in NTFS format being used as storage space by Win-XP?. . . . Or, the only choice is re-installation of Kubuntu with a revised partition?

[The Liquidator]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

@bai.ganga

To find out your graphics card (and other hardware) open a terminal and type

lspci

Please then post the output here.

Also, would I be right in assuming that you have gone 9.04-9.10-10.04 by internet upgrades, as opposed to downloading disks and installing?

[bai.ganga]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

Dear Liquidator,

Thank you very much for the response. Yes, I upgraded through internet upgrades. I did not download either 9.10 or 10.04 version - just clicked on the relevant button when the message said "upgrade to ___ version is available . The updater itself downloaded all the necessary files (it took almost six hours for each upgrade step because of my slow connection which was downloading at an average speed of 30 KBPS) - I did not even see where they were downloaded to in my computer - and then upgraded itself to the next version. First upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 and then next from 9.10 to 10.04. The only CD I have is of 9.04 version.

And, I have copied the result of "lspci" on terminal below for you to offer me further help in this:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M266 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 74)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]

[The Liquidator]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

Hi

This line may well be the crucial one

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]

That's your graphics card and I believe it's pretty old and maybe not well supported in current distributions. You could try checking in your package manager to see if you have the xorg package for the Savage Card. Before you try anything else I suggest we see if anyone else has any experiences with this card and can shed any light on how well it should work in later linux versions.

[bai.ganga]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

Dear Liquidator,

I do remember reading somewhere in this forum that Kubuntu will work very fine on a hard disk of 5 GB HDD and 256 MB RAM and hence, it is excellent way in which some old PCs could be put to use. Well, that was probably six to eight months ago and maybe, this 10.04 version was not even out then!?

Since yesterday, I have also seen pop up notification which says "you are running low on disk space on your home partition (current 3%, 181 MiB free)". This notification just pops up and goes off many times even while I am checking mail in the firefox browser. Maybe, this low disk space is the culprit (?) that causes sluggishness in operation !? I timed it today. From the time I hit enter to login to kubuntu after entering the password, it took about 45-47 seconds for the desktop to appear (with the widgets that I have placed there) and a total 190 seconds (that is, 145 seconds after the desktop appears) for the "music" to come on indicating that start-up is complete. Till this music starts, mouse click is non-effective although the cursor moves.

When I click on any document or media to open it, (ocular, open office or dragon player as the case may be) seems to take almost 30-40 seconds to open it. Earlier, same things used to open in about 10 to 15 seconds or so - (of course, open office used to take about 10 seconds extra compared to ocular or dragon player)!

Can anyone advise please?

[dibl]

Re: Slow after upgrade: Anyone else?

ext3 and ext4 filesystems reserve 5% of the partition capacity for overhead (used for journalling-related functions). So, when your filesystem goes over 95% full, everything starts slowing down and you get the "low on space" messages periodically.