[ale] ubuntu 12.04 SLOW!

Erik Mathis erik at mathists.com
Sun Jul 15 20:36:26 EDT 2012


You may want to run sar to gather system info.

The slowness in running FF while your drive is thrashing like, is to
be expected. (especially a laptop hard drive) due to FF needed to do
things like load libraries, read/write cache, all those things require
disk access.

-Erik-

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 3:43 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE)
<atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:
> OK. 11.04 is exhibiting molasses behavior too. Maybe I'm abusing the
> computer too much, but I'm confused. If you guys can tell me what's
> happening, please let me know. Regardless of the cause, I like Gnome 2 and
> configurable panels the best, hence 11.04.
>
> I'm trying to create a "clean" computer that border agents can inspect,
> should they choose, while I'm on the road. There will be nothing there to
> see but a plain vanilla install of Ubuntu.
>
> Here's what I did. Install the OS and all patches, which is now 11.04.
>
> Install the secure-delete program with synaptic. Use to fill up empty space
> and swap space to permanently delete deleted files.
>
> Turn off swap: sudo swapoff -a
> Fill the swap space with zeros: sudo sswap -l -v /dev/sda5 (let this run)
> Start filling the normal drive with zeros: sudo sfill -l -v / (let this run)
>
> These processes are incredibly slow, on the order of .5 MB / sec. So, I
> start creating junk files of my own to fill up the drive quicker.
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=./junk-16G bs=1G count=16
>
> This last item will create a 16GB file at about 25 MB / sec in my case.
>
> Note that, at this point, cpu utilization is UNDER 5 %. At the moment, there
> are still hundreds of GB of free HDD space.
>
> While all this is going on, I start Firefox and try to do some browsing,
> like playing youtube, etc. Firefox is so incredibly slow as to be almost
> unusable. It may take 5-10 seconds just to paint the screen. At other times,
> it works more smoothly. I'm totally baffled as to the reason. Filling up the
> hard drive will take a long time, so I want to multitask with the PC in the
> mean time. I don't know what's up. The lack of a swap area shouldn't be a
> problem as I have 8 GB of RAM.
>
> Also, when I use system monitor, and look at the file systems. It has a
> "free space" column and an "available space column". There are as much as
> about 15 GB of difference between them. Apparently, I can only fill up the
> available space with dd. But, sfill keeps going and fills up the free space,
> much slower. What does that mean.
>
> Any help is always appreciated.
>
> Sincerely,
>
>
> Ron
>
>
>
> --
>
> Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
> Please excuse my potential brevity.
>
> (To whom it may concern. My email address has changed. Replying to former
> messages prior to 03/31/12 with my personal address will go to the wrong
> address. Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
> 770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>
>
> Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Gee. Fedora uses Gnome3 and it does work (just tablet mentality).
>>
>> On 07/15/2012 02:02 PM, mike at trausch.us wrote:
>>
>> On 07/15/2012 01:59 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>>
>> However, I'm in a hurry to get this machine running. I deleted Ubuntu
>> 12.04 and went back to 11.04 with Gnome 2 that I know and (usually) love.
>>
>> It only takes about 30 minutes after adding the PPA to get GNOME 3 on
>> there and reboot.
>>
>> I am actually considering moving to Ubuntu on my desktop because the
>> Gentoo people aren't stabilizing GNOME 3 quickly enough (3.4 is out now,
>> damnit!) and there is little care in keeping the unstable GNOME 3 tree
>> updatable even if done daily.
>>
>> 	--- Mike
>>
>>
>>
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>
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