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    #1

    very sluggish performance? Solved (mostly)

    Hi all,

    I recently installed Kubuntu 8.10 and got everything to work with the exception of the screen that wont shutoff and the desktop background that resets every time I restart the computer but my real issue is performance, it is very sluggish most of the times... I have a pentium 4 2.80ghz with 512mb of ram and every time I have the audio player running + firefox with two or more tabs open at the same time the machine becomes very very slow to respond to anything, sometimes it takes several seconds to respond and if I have two media players open at the same time it get so slow that even the mouse pointer becomes unresponsive too.

    Checking the system monitor reveals that the processor is running at 100% when this occurs, I thought about upgrading the ram to 2gb but the ram is still ok when the issues happen. What can I do to fix this?

    While running a tweaked win xp on it the machine runs fairly quickly with none of the same issues.

    Will appreciate any help.

    Added 2gb of RAM and now it runs great, hardly ever it bogs down, occasionally the CPU pegs out at 100% while opening some programs but comes back to normal after a couple of seconds. Not sure what could be done about that... suggestions?
    Turned off the screen saver and now the monitor turns off like it's supposed to... before it would just turn off for a split second and turn back on.

    Leo
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    #2
    Re: very sluggish performance?

    I would fire up a konsole and run 'top' in it to find out which program is eating up all the CPU (press 'q' to exit top). From what you say about running 2 media players it sounds like the media might be the issue, but confirm that with top first.
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      #3
      Re: very sluggish performance?

      It keeps alternating between xorg or ksysguard...

      One other thing, internet speed is noticeably slower.
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        #4
        Re: very sluggish performance?

        Couple of things to think of that I have noticed can slow things up:

        strigi - Go into system settings/advanced and turn it off. If strigi is churning through files building an index that can impact on things.

        Nepomuk Again you can turn this off from within system settings /advanced. I have myself witnessed 100% CPU usage on my machine after closing down a big app (Windows running under Virtualbox) but this ceased completely when I disabled Nepomuk.

        One more thought, have you got a swap file set up, and what size is it?

        Ian
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          #5
          Re: very sluggish performance?

          Nepomuk semantic desktop was enabled. Turned it off now.

          Strigi was already off/disableded.

          What is a swap file? Sorry for the dumb question... Is it swap you see in the system monitor. If so it it is 267.4MiB/1.4GiB

          Thank you for all the input so far.

          Leo
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            #6
            Re: very sluggish performance?

            The swap file is part of the hard drive that the system uses to "swap" data, partly to conserve physical memory. By definition, it is slower than RAM. If you are consistently using swap then slower performance can be the result. Yours would appear to be 1.4Gb of which you have 267Mb in use. Probably not critical but if it is consistently like that then it might be. Wonder whether this is simply a RAM issue as the amount you have isn't much more than the recommended minimum. Certainly too little RAM will reduce the number of things you can have running before you start to hit the performance.

            When you say you have "tweaked" XP to make it work OK, what have you done, by way of interest?

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              #7
              Re: very sluggish performance?

              Thank you for your response again.

              After disabling Nepomuk the machine now seems slightly better, but not by much.

              Ok so the swap file is what I suspected, I also had it set close to that on Win XP.
              If this is just a case of not enough RAM then this is an easy/cheap fix, I was just afraid that the processor wasn't enough.
              Would 2gb of RAM be good or should I go with 4gb?

              As for the tweaked win xp, I just did some of the tweaks from this site http://www.digitalproducer.com/2002/...ze_pcaudio.htm to "optimize" it for audio reproduction. Basically just disable some features of the XP to make it run a little better.
              And I was running the latest SP3.

              Leo
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                #8
                Re: very sluggish performance?

                The cheapest fix would be to increase the amount of system RAM in your rig. The processor is fast enough. If you can afford to, I would upgrade the RAM to the maximum your rig will accept. You will see a significant performance increase.
                Windows no longer obstructs my view.
                Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007.
                "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock Holmes​
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                  #9
                  Re: very sluggish performance?

                  Ok I'll try that and report back...

                  Thanks.
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                    #10
                    Re: very sluggish performance?

                    Yes, more RAM would be good, but really it should go faster as it is, I think. I run Linux and KDE 3.5 on a little 630MHz Asus Eee PC and it works, so your 2.8GHz CPU should make it fly.

                    With constrained memory, you do need a swap partition, and it does need to be turned on. I'd go for 1GB with that hardware, or even more if you're planning on installing more memory. More here:

                    http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-swap-space.html

                    Also, the fact that "top" shows xorg running it up to 100% is probably related to your reported "screen won't shut off" -- I think something is haywire there that is affecting performance.

                    Finally, to get the last drop of performance, I offer you this:

                    http://rudd-o.com/en/archives/tales-...ow-to-fix-that

                    but don't expect to notice much difference, until the larger issues (swap and video) are working better.


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                      #11
                      Re: very sluggish performance?

                      Originally posted by dibl
                      Yes, more RAM would be good, but really it should go faster as it is, I think. I run Linux and KDE 3.5 on a little 630MHz Asus Eee PC and it works, so your 2.8GHz CPU should make it fly.

                      With constrained memory, you do need a swap partition, and it does need to be turned on. I'd go for 1GB with that hardware, or even more if you're planning on installing more memory. More here:

                      http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-swap-space.html

                      Also, the fact that "top" shows xorg running it up to 100% is probably related to your reported "screen won't shut off" -- I think something is haywire there that is affecting performance.

                      Finally, to get the last drop of performance, I offer you this:

                      http://rudd-o.com/en/archives/tales-...ow-to-fix-that

                      but don't expect to notice much difference, until the larger issues (swap and video) are working better.
                      That's what I thought as well. It ran fairly well on the Win XP but on Linux it's just as slow as it gets...

                      I'll look into your links.

                      Thank you.
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                        #12
                        Re: very sluggish performance?

                        Originally posted by dibl
                        Finally, to get the last drop of performance, I offer you this:

                        http://rudd-o.com/en/archives/tales-...ow-to-fix-that

                        but don't expect to notice much difference, until the larger issues (swap and video) are working better.
                        I tried that and was only able to run the tests but not make the changes. It took 13min on the first test.
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