Slow or unresponsive Desktop Application

[luvallcomputerses]

I have an older system with 4 Intel Core I3 2100 CPU @ 3.1 GHz with 8 gig of RAM. Root running on SSD drive with home on IDE drive. With 20.04 installed and fully updated with KDE Plasma 5.18.4 Kernel 5.4.0-28

If I have 1 virtual box and firefox open after some time my system gets unresponsive to moving between applications. If click start it take 10 seconds to open or if I try to open firefox from virtual box it takes 5 to 8 seconds to respond to the mouse.

The whole system seems to much slower than when running 19.10. I was able to move between application and open new applications with out any problems. I am guess that there is some new plasma settings that require a much higher graphic card than what I have. I am running Nvidia 340 driver on a GeForce 9500GT 512 MB card.

I read that in some versions I could lower my screen resolution and disable some special effect to help with this. I did not find information on how to do this in 20.04.

It is like a memory leak. I was not sure what program to run to see what resources are being used. I have 61% free memory and 16 gig swap file that I found by looking around.

I love 20.04 but the slow speed and not being able to switch or open programs is a big problem. It seems to do better after a restart. I found a suggestion about using openbox but wanted to ask if there is a setting that could be changed to speed everything back up.

Thank you to anyone who can send a link or suggestion on how to disable things that I might not need to get the unit back to a normal speed. This might be a bug.

Also in the hardware drivers I have HDA driver DKMS format from oem-audio-hda-daily-dkms (open source) running. The main board audio does not work so I have USB audio in an USB port that does audio for me. Maybe I need to remove the above driver.

I hope I have provided the details needed to help me.

Thank you

[Schwarzer Kater]

I doubt that missing power of your graphic card is the reason: my desktop computer uses an equally old and less powerfull Asus AMD Radeon HD 3450 with only 256MB and everything works really fine and without any hickups.

[claydoh]

Ksysguard is a system monitor you can use to see cpu and ram info.

Look at swap info. Even with 8gb ram, some systems seem to jump to swap too quickly. Add in running a virtual machine, it does seem like this could be the case. If you are hitting the swap file, even on an SSD, things will get extremely slow in the ways you are seeing.

Monitor this and see if it using swap too much. If so, this can be tweaked:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sw...I_change_it.3F

[jlittle]

baloo can do that, if its index gets corrupted, which always did eventually for me on previous releases. It might not show up near the top of the process table in ksysguard. If you are able to get to a konsole when Kubuntu is in strife, run balooctl status and if the "indexer" is running, that's a smoking gun. balooctl disable will turn it off.

[luvallcomputerses]

Thank for providing the above information. It helped me see what is going on with the computer. The first link swapfaq gave me good insight. My computer is set the default of 60. I did not change it. After more review I found that I had a bad hard drive that was being used for virtual box. I have cloned the drive to another drive and now the system seem to be working as expected. The hard drive had not failed but was on it way out. So the slowest was from a bad drive. So be sure to check hardware first. I used this link to review drives.

https://www.whileifblog.com/2011/09/...rd-disk-drive/ It helped me to see that one drive out of the 4 was heading south. Never thought about a drive just starting to fail doing that.

Thank you jlittle and claydoh for your input. I might have tried to fix something that was not needed. Have a great day.