Ubuntu 12.04 running slow: How to improve performance? [duplicate]

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How can I improve overall system performance?

I used to work in a computer (Dell Inspiron) with 2GB RAM, 80GB dd and Intel Core Processor with Ubuntu 10 under Gnome, and went well. It went slow when I had a Virtual Machine (VirtualBox with 512-1024 RAM) open, a big IDE from Tibco (say like Netbeans using 600MB RAM) and Firefox.

Then I installed Ubuntu 12.04 in another computer (Dell Inspiron too) Intel Core 2 Duo, 4Gb RAM, 500GB dd and I can only run the same programs and it gets really slow. Even worse than with the previous machine. I first tried with Ubuntu 64 bits and it was too slow, then I moved to Ubuntu 12.04 32 bits and is a little faster.

Even worse, sometimes I'm not doing anything and I see the disk drive reading a lot. When I list the processes all the processes are using like 2% of the CPU and the memory is below the 3GB used.

I don't know what to do. I have changed the swapiness (now is 10, before was 60), I have tested it with Unity 3D and 2D, I have installed preload and other programs alike but nothing.

I'm thinking it could be the partitions in the disk drive, but I don't know why it makes so many disks operations.

Thanks in advance for your help. What else can I do? Is something with Unity? is my computer configuration

Edit: (DMA output)

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   5236 MB in  2.00 seconds = 2624.56 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 240 MB in  3.01 seconds =  79.84 MB/sec

sudo dmesg |grep DMA
[    0.000000]   DMA      0x00000010 -> 0x00001000
[    0.000000]   DMA zone: 32 pages used for memmap
[    0.000000]   DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
[    0.000000]   DMA zone: 3951 pages, LIFO batch:0
[    0.790649] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xbfa0 irq 14
[    0.790652] ata2: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xbfa8 irq 15
[    0.952622] ata2.00: ATAPI: SONY CD-RW/DVD-ROM CRX880A, KD09, max UDMA/33
[    0.953649] ata1.00: ATA-8: WDC WD5000BEVT-00A03T0, 01.01A01, max UDMA/133
[    0.960633] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[    0.968317] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33
[    1.208604] mmc0: SDHCI controller on PCI [0000:02:01.1] using DMA

Answer 1

Unity tends to be a bit resource-hungry, though I am surprised to hear that you experienced similarly poor performance even under Unity2D. One possible solution would be to play around with other more lightweight Desktop Environments such as Lubuntu (LXDE) or Xubuntu (XFCE). I think you will see a substantial difference in overall responsiveness and performance.

Additionally, you can try going into the Startup Applications manager and unchecking applications and processes that you don't need Ubuntu to automatically start for you at login (e.g. Bluetooth Manager if you don't have bluetooth, UbuntuOne if you don't use it, programs you simply don't use, etc.) Before doing this, first make hidden startup applications visible in the manager:

sudo sed -i ‘s/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g’ /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

Answer 2

I would check for what processes are running and which ones are using up the most memory. There might be something you are installing that is a memory hogger. use top command or system monitor.

If you are not into eye candy, I even recommend installing the following packages. I noticed a considerable response time between unity and basic gnome

sudo apt-get install gnome-core gnome-session-fallback

I would also check my startup applications to see what runs at start up and what I don't need to run at start up.

And I would also check responsiveness in specific applications.

last thing I would check graphics settings. Maybe you need to compromise battery life for performance.

Answer 3

Found what was slowing down my machine: gwibber-service. Maybe because I have an account in twitter that follows a lot of people and when it refreshed the machine went bad.

I was monitoring the machine with top as said @kmassada and when it was really slow noticed the process. Then executing:

sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

as @blasmat indicated to go through Startup Applications I could see that the service started automatically and I disabled it. Now my computer is much faster. I think there are still improvements I can make (I don't feel it at it top conditions), but after 20 hours of testing the performance I can say it really goes well.

Answer 4

This solution worked for me.

I didn't have to reinstall the whole system again. I cloned my current machine (just in case) and set the configuration as the blog said and it does work. I don't think it is perfect but at least tolerable. The only thing I couldn't set is turn off the dynamic storage for a static one. Any ideas?