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I added these tweaks from Ubuntu SSD Tweak and Ubuntu Tweaks but now Texmaker is compiling slowly. Does someone know what tweak would be causing this? Or could I edit something unrelated to the tweaks to get Texmaker to compile as it did previously?

2nd Gen intel i5, 16GB Cosair ram, 240GB Cosair Force series GT, NTFS, quick build LaTex to PDF

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  • In case you don't get a suitable answer here, consider asking at tex.stackexchange.com .
    – user25656
    Mar 24, 2013 at 6:18

1 Answer 1

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Both guides you link to have you enable the discard mount option for your filesystem. In my experience, this kills performance. On every sync after a file has been deleted, a TRIM request gets sent, causing the disk to freeze up for 2 to 3 seconds. (This will be hardware-dependent.)

To see whether this is the problem, try testing fsync performance as suggested in this thread:

Running Theodore Ts'os "fsync-tester" while doing Linus' torture test

while : ; do time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=8M count=256 ; sync; rm bigfile"; done

shows it clearly

Sync should be fast on an SSD. In my case and that poster's case, each sync causes a lockup of several seconds. See also https://patrick-nagel.net/blog/archives/337 for a similar example.

If you see similar behavior, you should disable automatic TRIM by removing the discard option from your fstab. (But keep the noatime or relatime option that you probably added.)

Instead, periodically run fstrim on your filesystem, e.g. using cron. Several ways to do this are given in this article. This way you should still get the benefits of TRIM without the performance problems.

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