The computer is an EliteBook 8540w:
- ATI FirePro 5800 (using proprietary drivers)
- i7 720qm
- 8Gb RAM
- OCZ Agility III SSD
Ubuntu is freshly installed (a week ago). I have set swapiness to 10. When I'm on AC, I have the governor (using Jupiter) set on performance. top
shows no process over 10% and total never over 20%. Half of the RAM is unused and swap is empty.
And yet again, when I open a few browsers (Firefox with Flash disabled), Thunderbird, Skype, Smuxi, IDE (eclipse or JDev) and maybe some other program I need for work, the system starts being sluggish (desktop switching slow, overview slow (if I press win key), scrolling in programs slow).
Is there any other thing I should tweak to make this thing run smoothly?
UPDATE1:
Used iotop
, to find out what's hogging my IO (if anything): Firefox was caching and hogging the resources, I've increased the amount of memory it can use, still not nice but better, heard a leak was fixed in 15, but it's not in the updater yet (will wait). Also noticed that Smuxi (IRC client) was not playing nice, removed, switched to empathy (default). Added noatime to / disk mount, will post results after reboot.