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I have an old PC that is not very powerful, installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it recently and it is very slow. E.g. I have only Firefox open with two tabs and it takes seconds switching between the tabs. There are a couple of similar questions here but I also have another issue with my RAM that could be related to the first one, so decided to still post my question.
My hardware:
Memory: 3.7 GiB
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz × 4
Graphics: GeForce GT 610/PCIe/SSE2 / GeForce GT 610/PCIe/SSE2

The driver info says that I am using the recommended driver for this device, i.e. NVIDIA driver metapackage nvidia-driver-390 (proprietary, tested). By default my system was using another one after the installation but that led to RStudio crashing.
When opening the System Monitor (also very slow) all 4 CPUs seem to have very little load (a few percent) but it seems that I am using a lot of RAM: currently 2.5 GiB with only Firexfox (three tabs), the System Monitor and a terminal open. The strange thing is that when I add up all the memory usage for processes listed in the System Monitor I get way less RAM than the 2.5 GiB presumably being used. Same thing when I execute top in the terminal. top also gives different numbers than the System Monitor:
MiB Mem : 3831.3 total, 351.1 free, 2106.1 used, 1374.1 buff/cache
but the numbers here also don't add up. 2106.1 out of 3831.3 are roughly 55% but when I sum the percentages listed below I get only 34.8%. I am not an expert but it seems to me that the cache is also a lot. Is that normal?
Anyway, I will appreciate any advice on how to speed up my PC and how to make sense of my RAM usage.

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  • To have a better view of memory consumption, use free command. Here is an output from my system with 32GB ``` total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 32482244 8844928 387532 571688 23249784 22657708 ``` It looks like there is bellow 400k free. But Linux always uses memory for buffer/cache, here it shows 23GB used for that. But if apps need memory, OS will reduce cache and provide to applications. So the important column is the last one, available memory which is over 22GB in my case. Much better than 400k ;)
    – marosg
    Dec 19, 2020 at 14:31
  • sorry about the output formatting, comments are strange
    – marosg
    Dec 19, 2020 at 14:33

1 Answer 1

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first check the bad sectors and the health of your hdd(i suggest upgrade to ssd) second 4gb Second 4gb of ram is the minimum ammount nowdays so check if your computer is able to upgrade to 8gb.

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