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:
- Made sure I installed all the latest updates.
- Installed non-free drivers using sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree
- BIOS and UEFI: set it to AHCI - No option in my BIOS to do this, so had to skip
- 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.
- 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.
- Ext 4 was set up by default: verified in gparted
- Disabled the write action "access time stamp" by editing: /etc/fstab
- Enabled automatic TRIM by editing: /etc/rc.local
- Ran a manual trim executing: sudo fstrim -v /
- 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.
sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda
. Compare the performance data with the one for your old disk to determine if it's indeed slower.