Ubuntu 9.04 slow swapping. Would an SSD help? Or a newer version?

[Ken g6]

I've been running this computer with Ubuntu 9.04 for 2.5 years now. I know it's not supported anymore, but I ran into problems when I tried to upgrade to 9.10. So I'm not anxious to try again soon.

One major problem I've had since I put it together is that swapping is really slow! I set my swappiness low so it doesn't happen much, but when I run out of my 4GB RAM it can take up to 15 minutes to resolve the swapping necessary to get things working again. And during that time everything is either very slow or frozen.

So, how can I improve performance during swapping? I have two HDDs now, so I could move my swap partition off my main drive to the bigger, newer, but slower (5400RPM) one. But would that make things better or worse?

I could also get an SSD. My SATA ports are limited, and only SATA2, but I think I could find room. If so, would it make sense to move my swap partition to the SSD? Would it make more sense to move some OS files from my installation to the SSD? If so, which ones?

Or should I just bite the bullet and install a newer Ubuntu version? If so, could I install the new version on the SSD and still be able to boot into the old version on the HDD? About how big an SSD, minimum, would it take to do that? (Consider that I might want to reserve half the SSD for Windows.)

 

[lxskllr]

I dunno about the swapping. I've had some issues with it myself. It seemed to get worse when I set the swappiness low. The default number(60?) seemed to work better.

How are you using so much ram? I'm at 1.3gb usage, and I don't think I've seen it past 1.5gb. The most cost effective upgrade would be more ram.

Anyway, it's time for an upgrade. You could do 11.10, or wait until April, and do 12.04. That'll be an LTS release so you're next upgrade will be in 2014 if you don't want to take the intermediate releases.

You can easily fit Ubuntu in 20gb, and have plenty of room for some media. You could even cut back on that a lot if you weren't going to install anything in Ubuntu. To do that, you'd install Ubuntu to the new drive, and I /think/ GRUB2 will override the old GRUB bootloader, and show all your O/Ss. If not, it should be easy enough to uninstall GRUB from the old drive, and use GRUB2 on the new one.

 

[Ken g6]

How are you using so much ram?

Top 10 or so processes, out of 4GB RAM:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
  795 ken       20   0 1417m 844m  22m S   27 21.9 215:01.50 firefox-bin        
 4293 root      20   0 1026m 492m 133m S   12 12.7 598:30.27 Xorg               
 9809 ken       20   0  948m 304m  10m S    0  7.9   4:08.16 nautilus           
11807 ken       20   0  854m 221m  17m S    0  5.7  19:30.14 thunderbird-bin    
 4855 ken       20   0  714m 151m 8220 S    1  3.9  66:33.07 gnome-panel        
19026 ken       20   0  444m  93m 8520 S    5  2.4 104:40.22 skype.real         
10628 ken       20   0  741m  61m  11m S    0  1.6  51:07.56 plugin-containe    
11172 ken       20   0 1337m  53m 1044 S    0  1.4   1:14.61 java               
24315 ken       20   0  334m  41m  24m S    0  1.1   0:03.88 kolourpaint        
32264 ken       20   0  623m  39m 7440 S    0  1.0   1:37.23 soffice.bin

- Firefox is v3.6.something with about 70 tabs open. I know v9.01 is more efficient, but I won't upgrade it until I can duplicate the functionality of Sage-Too. (Which means like Sage, but with Ad Block.) I've been working on it the past couple of weekends, with PHP and Stylish; I'm getting closer.
- I have no idea why Xorg is going so nuts with RAM.
- Nautilus seems to like to remember thumbnails of every file in every directory I look at. :\ I sometimes kill it and restart it to free RAM.
- Throw in a 1GB VirtualBox VM of Win2K, which I use for work, and you get to 4GB pretty quickly.
- And that doesn't even count some of the distributed computing apps I use. PrimeGrid is generally fine, but some of the biology ones can take 500MB or more per core!

When I had swappiness at the default, the system would freeze when I used only 40% of my memory! It's better with low swappiness - but not zero, so I can see the problem coming.