Ubuntu - Slow?

BeatMaster · 1 Nov 2007 at 19:38

I've been having a play with Ubuntu over the last couple of weeks but have just booted back into Windows and things seem to be quicker in Windows.

Any tips to speed up Ubuntu on bootup and general running?

I looked into initng but didn't manage to get it working...

Thanks in advance,

BeatMaster

swinnie · 1 Nov 2007 at 19:42

What's the system specification?

BeatMaster · 1 Nov 2007 at 20:33

AMD Opteron 165 @ Stock
DFI Ultra-D
2x 512Mb Corsair PC3200LL
Western Digital WD500AAKS 500Gb SATA II
Nvidia 7800GT

So a fairly decent spec, not sure what is slowing things down on the Ubuntu side.

GarethDW · 1 Nov 2007 at 20:37

Can you post your dmesg as this might show if there's some problem during boot up.

I had to add acpi=off and noacpi to my grub entry because my dmesg was showing lots of "lost interrupts" when my drives were being identified during boot up.

swinnie · 1 Nov 2007 at 20:43

I can't see it being hardware related either.

aceface57 · 1 Nov 2007 at 21:04

My Ubuntu feels slower than xp as well. I am loving Ubuntu so not wanting to go back to xp instead try and solve this problem. I think my problem lies with graphics though, as firefox scrolls slowly and it's quite jerky. I don't think my integrated intel card is well supported though at the moment in gutsy.

Simian · 2 Nov 2007 at 08:26

I was getting random 'Grey-Outs' and very jerky/slow scrolling in most programs (most notably Firefox).. I found that I had to turn off the 'Rotating Cube' in Compiz!... Firefox and everything else flys now!!

My Graphics is a bit old (gForce MX400 64mb) but the rest of my system ain't too bad!.. 3.4Ghz Athlon but only 512mb...

BeatMaster · 2 Nov 2007 at 12:44

Will look at dmesg tonight, hopefully that might speed things up a bit. I always envisaged Linux to be as quick as Mac OS X which boots really fast. Once up and running things appear to be quite quick, although for some reason some pieces of software seem to take a while to startup so will try turning off rotating cube.

Will post back with results.

Simian · 2 Nov 2007 at 13:35

Turn of 'Wobbly Windows' too!!!... that's another Memory Hog!!

uk_viper · 2 Nov 2007 at 13:36

try using top, see whats using your processes

Rich43 · 2 Nov 2007 at 16:30

Try 64bit version, perhaps thats faster?
The more ram you got in Linux, the more it can cache in ram, try getting 2GB :-)

Edit: Vista does that too / vista stole it!

Oh and the newer versions of ubuntu dont need initng as it has a similar thing called upstart out the box which pretty much does same job.
Edit: I think Upstart was put in from Edgy 6.10

BeatMaster · 2 Nov 2007 at 19:02

Tried turning acpi off but then linux failed to boot

May try the 64bit edition to see if that has any performance gains. I mean how fast should Ubuntu 7.10 be booting? Comparable speeds to XP?

After the loading bar it goes to an orange desktop, then flashes to a larger desktop and then changes to my desktop followed by a few seconds or so later by icons. However on XP after the loading bar it appears with Welcome and then 2 seconds later the desktop and away I can go...

BeatMaster

aceface57 · 4 Nov 2007 at 03:25

I'm still having problems with my graphics speed on ubuntu, in fact I've made it worse by changing the drivers used from vesa to Intel 810i. My integrated graphics is an Intel 845 chipset (i think). Also found another unrelated problem with my laptop tonight that has nothing to do with the OS, is that when I have my mobile sitting on the laptop and receive a call or text, it reboots the laptop

I'm determined to fix this problem dammit!