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I've been running Ubuntu 14.04 on my old Dell 6400 laptop with 2Gb RAM (max) with a small 60Gb HDD and Unity performance has been fine.

Last night I dropped in a 128Gb Adata SP600 SSD and installed 14.04 desktop (32 bit version). System boots up very fast, but Unity UI performance slowed to 'molasses': windows fade in and out really slow and when I play video in vlc player from my usb drive, its really choppy. Video played smooth and other wise just fine on the HDD.

I've re-installed 14.04 several times on the SSD and still get the sluggish responsiveness from the UI. I'm going to try a my other SSDs to see if its the drive, but am wondering if anyone has any suggestions (like increasing swap size, etc.). Was really surprised to see performance get worse with an SSD!

Update #1

  • /tmp and /var are both on /dev/sda1
  • both drives have a 2Gb swap
  • sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda test: SSD avg (n=5) = 111.88, HDD avg (n=5) = 39.41 Mb/sec
  • variance was small between samples, so the SSD is roughly 3X faster the the HDD
  • "latest" firmware on SSD is dated 2013-07-08

HDD is a 60Gb 5400rmp Seagate Momentus. Although SSD is pretty slow relative to the HDD, it is still roughly 3X faster. So hardware alone is probably not the reason the SSD is slower.

Next thing to try are the other optimizations. I'm not very optimistic, but hope I'm wrong.

Update #2

Cloned the Adata SSD to my SanDisk Extreme and saw the same sluggish performance. Next, I did these 9 optimizations:

  1. Made sure I installed all the latest updates.
  2. Installed non-free drivers using sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree
  3. BIOS and UEFI: set it to AHCI - No option in my BIOS to do this, so had to skip
  4. Check for updated firmware - Adata firmware update tool doesn't work on Windows 7, so I'm stuck with firmware that came with the drive. Lesson: Avoid Adata drives if you're running Linux.
  5. Swap: Install sets to 2Gb. Recommendation was 7% over-provisioning which would have been 9Gb for the 128Gb drive. Tried 2, 9 and 0 swap, but didn't see any difference in performance.
  6. Ext 4 was set up by default: verified in gparted
  7. Disabled the write action "access time stamp" by editing: /etc/fstab
  8. Enabled automatic TRIM by editing: /etc/rc.local
  9. Ran a manual trim executing: sudo fstrim -v /
  10. Set vm.swappiness=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf

reference: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd

Video was still choppy.

@Ubuntu Fanatic: Yes, the laptop is older HW (purchased 2006) running on the older SATA bus and appears to be performing at expected speed. Other articles suggest removing the swap, so I booted to a gparted Live disk and removed the swap that the Ubuntu installer created (2Gb). Didn't expect to see a performance improvement and didn't, but should improve life of the drive.

@Mike Jr/Eric C.: I have integrated graphics on this ancient laptop. I'll try XUbuntu next, but for now, going back to the little spinner which was working just fine.

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  • I know that there are different ways to format the SSD under windows, if you do it right it will be 3x faster. anyway your ssd should be 5-7 times faster than HDD. something must be wrong in the setup.
    – Private
    Sep 11, 2014 at 14:56
  • Which partitions do you have your /tmp and /var stored on? Sep 11, 2014 at 15:13
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    Interestingly, all the symptoms you mention point to a video driver, rather than a disk, problem. It sounds like your system is using VESA/software rendering, which is dog-slow as you noted. Did you by any chance forget to install some video driver? To be certain, you could run some disk performance tests sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda. Compare the performance data with the one for your old disk to determine if it's indeed slower.
    – roadmr
    Sep 11, 2014 at 15:28
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    You may want to check if the SSD you bought is defective. I had a similar problem with my 64GB Crucial SSD (V4-CT064 to be exact) the SSD starts off fine but quickly becomes woefully slow in both Linux and Windows. In my case the drive model was defective and Crucial even knew this when I bought the SSD and when I complained they offered me £20 exVAT to buy another crucial drive even though the price I paid for it was much higher. In the end I had to reinstall Linux on an old 80GB Hard Drive to increase performance. Sep 11, 2014 at 15:53
  • @roadmr I did the same install on both the HDD and the SSD relying on the out-of-the-box drivers. If the performance was fine on the HDD, but not the SSD, not seeing how the video driver could be the issue. The disk performance suggestion does make sense and will do this. Sep 11, 2014 at 20:08

2 Answers 2

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Sounds like the connection might be maxing it out.

You say it's an older computer so it likely has IDE or sata 1 which means 150 MBs is the best you could expect mathematically. Remember sata 1 is 1.5GBs raw, but only 150mbs usable, sata 2 is 3GBs raw 300mbs usable, and sata 3 is 6GBs raw 600MBs usable.

Real world you're exactly where you should be for the kind of connection I assume you're using.

Also you're using swap on the hard drive which means any data that gets saved there will reduce your system performance! Loose the hard drive swap, or at least disable it at startup.

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I run Ubuntu inside Virtualbox which has its own set of performance concerns. You are running native so I would suggest looking at these two steps from this post http://www.binarytides.com/better-xubuntu-14-04/

  1. Speed up the user interface

Create a file named .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory and paste in the following lines

gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0 
gtk-menu-popdown-delay = 0 
gtk-menu-bar-popup-delay = 0 
gtk-enable-animations = 0 
gtk-timeout-expand = 0
gtk-timeout-initial = 0
gtk-timeout-repeat = 0

Save the file, close it, logout and login back. Now all gui elements like menus, buttons should be faster.

To speed up Xubuntu further, disable the compositor from "All Settings > Window Manager Tweaks > Compositor Tab". It will save system resources from being spend on fancy desktop effects.

  1. Install additional drivers ("That SSD likely has a proprietary driver")

If you have hardware components for which proprietary drivers are available, then you can install them to get the best performance. For example Nvidia graphics card work best with the proprietory drivers from nvidia instead of the free and open source nouveau drivers.

For Nvidia drivers follow this article Install the latest Nvidia drivers on Xubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

For more hardware units like wireless cards, check the Additional Drivers section. Click the menu on top left, go to All Settings > Additional Drivers and install the ones that you need.

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