Everything is very slow since I upgraded

[Tib-Tib]

Hi,

I have a DELL Latitude D410,
I just upgraded to natty
Now when I start there's a blue screen that says:
Error: invalid environment block
Press any key to continue...

Wether I press a key or not it will continue and actually boot quite fast.

Everything works properly but it all run so slow, I got to wait at least 10sec for the launch menu to come up after I clicked, when I am typing it gets to the scree a couple of seconds late and every thing is so slow.

Is it that my computer is too slow to handle natty?
If so, shall I go back to what I had before (kubuntu 10.04 I think it was) ?
If so how can I do that? I still have the live USB that I used to install kubuntu 10.04 in the first place.

I'm happy to keep natty if I can make it go as fast as it was before.

Thanks for your help

TiBo

[GreyGeek]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

Open a Konsole and do
sudo powertop

and copy & paste the results in your next msg.

[claydoh]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

On a machine of that vintage, it should run OK, in my experiences with pentium 4 laptops, one key thing to do is turn off strigi, and maybe nepomuk, if they have been re-enabled during the upgrade. If you have 1gb or less ram, these may be causing you to be hitting the swap file while the indexing is running.

Certain Intel graphics may still have issues in Natty, but I think most should be OK now. I believe your laptop may have the GMA 900 gpu. I would suggest disabling desktop effects (either in System Settings, or via alt-shift-F12). If that does help, simply disabling Blur effect may be enough to allow you to keep some effects action going

[Tib-Tib]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

I might not be doing it properly, here's what I get in the console:

tibo@tibo-Latitude-D410:~$ killall strigi
strigi: no process found
tibo@tibo-Latitude-D410:~$ killall nepomuk
nepomuk: no process found
tibo@tibo-Latitude-D410:~$ sudo powertop
[sudo] password for tibo:
sudo: powertop: command not found

Though, I turned off all the desktop effect and it is much better now. But isn't that just a work around and not really fixing the problem?

Thanks for your help!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

I never run with desktop effects. The "Cube" is nice eye candy, but one soon tires of it and it is a lot quicker just to click on the desktop pager to move to another virtual desktop, which is also something I rarely use. One soon tires of Apps exploding or burning up when you close them. I also don't run screen savers because with modern displays and drivers there is nothing to "save". They won't phosphor burn like the old P4 terminals did.

[claydoh]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

I dunno, I have not yet tired of wobbly windows
But I do like the fading and slight transparencies, makes things less harsh or abrupt, if that makes any sense.

[Tib-Tib]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

Ok I agree but though if the desktop effect are supposed to work and they don't that means it is not running at the optimum capacity.
And I still have the error message at boot
and why the sudo powertop command doesn't work?

[kubicle]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

1. You can enable/disable strigi and nepomuk in SystemSettings > DesktopSearch

2. 'powertop' is not installed by default:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install powertop

3. For graphics slowness, you could try changing QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM to raster (if you are currently using the default), seems to speed up things with some hardware:

echo "export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=raster" > ~/.kde/env/qt-graphicssystem.sh

and relog into KDE
(you can undo the change - if you need to - with 'rm ~/.kde/env/qt-graphicssystem.sh')

[Tib-Tib]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

So here's what I get with powertop:

PowerTOP version 1.13 (C) 2007 Intel Corporation

Cn Avg residency P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running) ( 6.6%) 1.60 Ghz 8.3%
polling 0.0ms ( 0.0%) 1333 Mhz 0.0%
C1 halt 0.0ms ( 0.0%) 1067 Mhz 0.0%
C2 1.6ms ( 5.9%) 800 Mhz 91.7%
C3 2.4ms ( 4.4%)
C4 10.8ms (83.0%)

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 133.5 interval: 2.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available

Top causes for wakeups:
20.6% ( 25.0) firefox-bin
19.8% ( 24.0) [extra timer interrupt]
16.5% ( 20.0) knotify4
11.5% ( 14.0) [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
9.5% ( 11.5) plasma-desktop
9.1% ( 11.0) [uhci_hcd:usb3, b43] <interrupt>
2.5% ( 3.0) [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
1.6% ( 2.0) mysqld
0.8% ( 1.0) konsole
0.8% ( 1.0) irq/17-b43
0.8% ( 1.0) kworker/0:0
0.8% ( 1.0) Xorg
0.8% ( 1.0) threaded-ml
0.8% ( 1.0) kwin
0.8% ( 1.0) knemo
0.8% ( 1.0) [kernel core] add_timer (tg3_timer)
0.8% ( 1.0) kworker/u:2
0.4% ( 0.5) PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad interrupt
0.4% ( 0.5) packagekitd
0.4% ( 0.5) krunner
0.4% ( 0.5) kded4





Suggestion: Enable the CONFIG_PM_ADVANCED_DEBUG kernel configuration option.
This option will allow PowerTOP to collect runtime power management statistics.

And I disabled strigi and nepomuk but the desktop effect still slow everything down.
Then I changed to raster and reboot and still very slow.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

Your computer is spending 90% of its time running at 1/2 the speed of the CPU. Open System Settings --> Power Management and change to the highest performance setting it has.

[Snowhog]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

Just try disabling the Blur effect. That may just be sufficient to allow a responsive desktop, with other effects of your choosing.

[Tib-Tib]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

Alrite, I disabled blur and it does run good now.

I looked to change the performance settings in Power Management but there isn't such a thing.

And what about the error message that I get at boot that says:

Error: invalid environment block
Press any key to continue...

Anyone got an idea what that could be about?
Shall I open a different thread for that?

Cheers

[kubicle]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

And what about the error message that I get at boot that says:

Error: invalid environment block
Press any key to continue...

Anyone got an idea what that could be about?

Looks like a grub environment block error (saved default boot entry might refer to a non-existing entry, for example).

What is the output of:

grub-editenv - list

[GreyGeek]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

This is a bug and the solution to this problem is in response #11 of the bug report:

You need to be able load a live linux operating system that can write your your filesystem.

I used a live-usb drive. You can use the ubuntu install cd for this purpose.

After booting into the live cd based environment, you need to mount the partition on your main system that contains /boot.

Then you can make the necessary modifications to grubenv as per comments above.

cd /boot/grub
rm grubenv
grub-editenv grubenv create
grub-editenv grubenv set default=0
grub-editenv grubenv list
default=0

This should give a bootable system.

[wizard10000]

Re: Everything is very slow since I upgraded

I dunno, I have not yet tired of wobbly windows

Me neither

Everybody's different. I find I'm a little more productive when I enjoy my environment so I use a little bit of eye candy as well.

I think that some of the effects available (mainly in compiz) are just intellectual masturbation for developers, as I can't see anybody appreciating windows that explode, burn, get rained on or do the magic lamp thing for very long. For me the weirdest thing in compiz is being able to set random effects - you'd never know what your window was gonna do

Some of it's a little amusing, though. It's like X screensavers, most of which are kinda awful. I don't use them either