Ubuntu 9.10 is insanely slow.

By gibsongirl
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CelticWhisper

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Interesting, since I noticed a tremendous speed boost in 9.10 over 9.04. I second Symod's request - more info will help us get to the bottom of it. Some preliminary suggestions - fsck the boot volume and check to see what you have loading at startup. Also, see if there are any updated hardware drivers available - you may have been using one previously that went away and haven't installed the replacement yet.

EDIT: Are these your specs?

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markwolfe Veteran

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There should not have been a huge performance change, really. Maybe ext4 would be a little faster on disk I/O. Maybe boot times would be improved. But GNOME is still GNOME, and the Linux kernel is still the same (with some other smaller improvements).

I suspect that what Growled is on to might be the correct answer. Which video driver are you using? What video hardware do you have installed?

  • 2 weeks later...
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gibsongirl

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Thanks. I think I had asked this question before with one of the previous flavors of ubuntu. Thanks all again so much. I think I am going to run my system specs in my signature text from now on, that way I won't forget to post them.

Dell dimension B110

2 GB Ram

NVidia 6200 series card

160 Gb Hdd holds XP home

80 GB Hdd runs Koala

Grand Master

+Frank B. Subscriber²

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Thanks. I think I had asked this question before with one of the previous flavors of ubuntu. Thanks all again so much. I think I am going to run my system specs in my signature text from now on, that way I won't forget to post them.

Dell dimension B110

2 GB Ram

NVidia 6200 series card

160 Gb Hdd holds XP home

80 GB Hdd runs Koala

What exactly is slow - graphics performance? OS and/or application start up?

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markwolfe Veteran

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If you think that the hard drive performance is a problem, run the following to get some hard numbers for us to look at:

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

If you think it is the graphics system, post the output of this command:

glxinfo | grep render

To look at RAM usage, do this one for us to look at:

free

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gibsongirl

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CW, yes those are the basic specs for my computer with the addition of an Nvidia 6200 series card, 2 GB ram and an 80 gb hdd.

I thought the os was slowing down computer performance. I have italicized the information from all three below. Thanks for your time all.

If you think that the hard drive performance is a problem, run the following to get some hard numbers for us to look at:

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sdb:

Timing cached reads: 1426 MB in 2.00 seconds = 712.93 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 66 MB in 3.04 seconds = 21.71 MB/sec

If you think it is the graphics system, post the output of this command:

glxinfo | grep render

direct rendering: Yes

OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 6200/PCI/SSE2

GL_NVX_conditional_render, GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap, GL_SGIS_texture_lod,

To look at RAM usage, do this one for us to look at:

free

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 2060120 687568 1372552 0 91832 320508

-/+ buffers/cache: 275228 1784892

Swap: 3229024 0 3229024

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markwolfe Veteran

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Your hard drive is about 1/3 of my speed for buffered disk reads (I get 68.57 MB/s on a SATA average drive - not a speed freak here). Is your drive SATA or legacy ATA with the 40-pin ribbon connector?

You aren't touching your swap at all, so you aren't losing time with paging data in and out. And your video looks good, I don't see any problems with your rendering.

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gibsongirl

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Your hard drive is about 1/3 of my speed for buffered disk reads (I get 68.57 MB/s on a SATA average drive - not a speed freak here). Is your drive SATA or legacy ATA with the 40-pin ribbon connector?

You aren't touching your swap at all, so you aren't losing time with paging data in and out. And your video looks good, I don't see any problems with your rendering.

It is a legacy ATA with 40-pin ribbon connector. Here is the weird thing though. I ran a palimpsest disk utility thing and am getting a prefailure disk warning with both the 80 gb and 160 gb hdds. And apparently unplugging the slave hdd causes the computer to not be able to find the primary disk drive 0 or 1 and I have to have both drives plugged in for the computer to boot.

Bizarre, eh?

Grand Master

Subject Delta

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It is a legacy ATA with 40-pin ribbon connector. Here is the weird thing though. I ran a palimpsest disk utility thing and am getting a prefailure disk warning with both the 80 gb and 160 gb hdds. And apparently unplugging the slave hdd causes the computer to not be able to find the primary disk drive 0 or 1 and I have to have both drives plugged in for the computer to boot.

Bizarre, eh?

Are one of those drives on a "cable select" setting? If you unplug the slave and the other drive is on "Cable Select" it can confuse some BIOSes

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gibsongirl

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Are one of those drives on a "cable select" setting? If you unplug the slave and the other drive is on "Cable Select" it can confuse some BIOSes

are you referring to the 10 pin group? The ones that are labeled in pairs? CS, Slave, Master, (Blank), PM2? The master drive is set as master and the slave drive is set to slave.

Grand Master

markwolfe Veteran

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It is a legacy ATA with 40-pin ribbon connector. Here is the weird thing though. I ran a palimpsest disk utility thing and am getting a prefailure disk warning with both the 80 gb and 160 gb hdds. And apparently unplugging the slave hdd causes the computer to not be able to find the primary disk drive 0 or 1 and I have to have both drives plugged in for the computer to boot.

Bizarre, eh?

Not so bizarre.

Some drives have a separate "Master only" and "Master with Slave" setting. So, if your master requires a slave present, and it isn't there, it doesn't work.

As far as the disk utility reporting premature failure, you might want to check your drive's SMART data.

You can do a couple of things.

sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdb for a brief one-state summary

sudo smartctl --test=short /dev/sdb to perform a test taking about a minute

or

sudo smartctl --test=long /dev/sdb to perform a test taking well over an hour (I think that 1 minute should be enough)

I think after the test is completed, you need to re-do the "-H" version to see the result. I'm not that certain, though, so may be wrong on that.

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gibsongirl

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Not so bizarre.

Some drives have a separate "Master only" and "Master with Slave" setting. So, if your master requires a slave present, and it isn't there, it doesn't work.

As far as the disk utility reporting premature failure, you might want to check your drive's SMART data.

You can do a couple of things.

sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdb for a brief one-state summary

sudo smartctl --test=short /dev/sdb to perform a test taking about a minute

or

sudo smartctl --test=long /dev/sdb to perform a test taking well over an hour (I think that 1 minute should be enough)

I think after the test is completed, you need to re-do the "-H" version to see the result. I'm not that certain, though, so may be wrong on that.

But the crazy thing is, that I added the slave drive. The computer came to me with just the one drive, so I should be able to figure out how to reset it to its original connection. I wonder if the ribbon cable could be part of the problem?

sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdb for a brief one-state summary: sudo: smartctl: command not found :huh:

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Electric Jolt

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But Chrome OS should be all people will need anymore... Think of it this way, not a lot of software on Linux that is productive, so why need all the bloat that does nothing? Chrome OS is a smooth experience based on Linux like Android. Google can help Linux out by introducing new operating systems based on Linux, the other distros will follow. ;)

Grand Master

redvamp128

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Did you apply all the updates? -

Also if you noticed it was faster before a kernel update , I would say try an earlier one .

You can hit escape as soon grub shows up- then test to see if maybe an earlier one is faster.

on my other system- I did notice a speed slow down with one kernel update- but I went back to one earlier- but the next one fixed it.

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