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Ubuntu 9.1 sluggish on my eee904HA :-(

Jschmuck2

Jschmuck2

Diamond Member
Knowing absolutely nothing about Linux, I decided to install Ubuntu 9.1 NBR on my netbook just to try and learn something. It's a little stick figuring out command line stuff but more importantly, things feel slow. Is that normal? XP felt much, much snappier.

Is it me?
 
What stuff did you have to do on the command line? That seems unusual, there isn't much on Ubuntu that should require it.

And what feels slow?
 
I didn't have to do anything, I just went poking around in there to see what's what 🙂 Didn't change or mess with anything - just trying to wrap my head around a new O/S.

As far as the slowness goes, it's mostly in the menus and in Firefox. Even as I type this, on every third word there's a delay that holds up the first few letters of a word when I type it. And the menus in the netbook remix area are fairly sluggish, too.
 
did your xp include a copy of the OC utility that auto OCs when youre plugged in? cause mine does, and that and better battery life are why i use xp on my netbook more than linux...its noticeably faster when OCed, otherwise it probably runs about the same as 9.04 for me, more or less
 
Jschmuck2 said:
I didn't have to do anything, I just went poking around in there to see what's what 🙂 Didn't change or mess with anything - just trying to wrap my head around a new O/S.

As far as the slowness goes, it's mostly in the menus and in Firefox. Even as I type this, on every third word there's a delay that holds up the first few letters of a word when I type it. And the menus in the netbook remix area are fairly sluggish, too.
Click to expand...

Well, the netbook remix interface makes use of the 3d graphics, which are fairly slow on netbooks unfortunately. Also, make sure the display compositing effects are disabled (under system, preferences, appearance) otherwise you'll get a double hit to performance.

It's weird that you have that kind of delay on firefox. There were issues with Intel graphics on 9.04, but 9.10 is supposed to have fixed them (and in my experience, has). Try switching to normal desktop mode? Maybe the netbook remix interface is adding undue slowness.

You shouldn't be having those kind of performance issues. Go into system -> administration -> software sources and check all the checkboxes (4 on the first tab minus source code checkbox, the partner checkbox under other software, and all 4 ubuntu updates options under updates) and then check for updates and grab any, it's possible it's some issue that's been fixed in an update already.

Otherwise, I don't see why it should be that slow. Though note, flash is quite slow on Linux, so getting flashblock could help firefox's performance, though I haven't needed it on mine.
 
Jschmuck2 said:
Is that normal? XP felt much, much snappier.

Is it me?
Click to expand...
OOTB, XP is snappier, so yes that's normal. Then again, XP is several years old, and designed to run on weak hardware. Most major/modern Linux distros are just as resource intensive as (say) Vista.

The good news is, given enough time n' effort, you can make Linux run almost as snappy as XP on your netbook. I'm running a full desktop install of Linux Mint 7 on my Eee PC 1000HD. I've been tweaking it for almost 6 months, and it just keeps getting better n' better.

Anyway, it's not just you. Linux requires some optimization for best results, especially on netbooks.

If you don't feel like - or don't know how to roll your own, you might try Eeebuntu. I ran the standard version for a while, and it worked quite nicely. The kernel has been compiled specifically for Eee PCs, and so forth, and so on... and the theme is very nice too.
 
Ubuntu 8.04 works very well on my Eee900. The only slowdowns I get are when the HD gets written to; very noticeable with Firefox on the web. The 900 has a slow SSD is the reason. Otherwise things work well. I have full compiz effects enabled, and it works very smoothly.
 
If 3D effects and compositing are on, then yes, will be slow.

And as noted, so is flash for linux.

I've experienced the same "[linux distro] is slower than XP" thing in one of my older laptops, 3 years ago. Fedora Core 5 with Gnome was unacceptably slow on it, and switching to KDE didn't help, but going with XFCE helped a lot.

I'm not saying you should switch desktop managers 🙂 What I'm trying to say is, XP ran quicker on that laptop, and it's no surprise because most laptops are made for Windows anyway - they have Windows drivers and features that - surprise, surprise - only work on Windows. On my MSI Wind U100, I discovered I get 1 hour less of battery life (3 hours and 30 minutes) compared to XP (4 hours, 25 minutes), because MSI's battery saving modes are of course only working on Windows.

The performance difference is perhaps only more noticeable in netbooks because they're a lot slower than regular laptops.

But I guess this is the wrong thing to say, right? You're just worried that something is wrong, and you're just playing around with Ubuntu to learn a new OS. That's fantastic. So no, nothing's wrong with it or with you, it's really just a little slower than XP, doing some changes to some settings will make it a little faster, and good luck on your experimentation with Linux 🙂
 
Although I'm very new to ubuntu, I just installed 9.10 netbook remix on my 1000H and havent noticed any difference. IDK what the difference is, but maybe try that and see
 
jvroig said:
If 3D effects and compositing are on, then yes, will be slow.

And as noted, so is flash for linux.[...]
Click to expand...
Yep! On my netbook, I uninstall (totally remove) Compiz, disable compositing, animations, thumbnails and splash screen in Metacity, scale down the icons in menus, etc. etc.

One of the things I like about tweaking Linux is... it usually makes a dramatic difference. LoL! Appropriate changes will make your computer run amazingly better and faster. Inappropriate changes will brick it! XP tweaks mostly produce a placebo effect.

The only reason I dual-boot Windows & Linux on my netty is because I got a free XP license when I bought my Eee PC - and I don't throw anything away. While I don't use XP, I do boot into it every couple of months, to keep up with the security updates.

BTW, I improved my Flash performance in Linux Mint 7 (Ubu 9.04 with lipstick) by installing new video drivers and optimizing the various config files. Believe it or not, one of the biggest problems was the WiFi drivers. For some inexplicable reason(s), network activity was causing the display to go wonky. The panel flashed and flickered when I was on the web. It almost looked like there was a short in the wiring (but it didn't do this with XP, sooo). Switching to MadWifi drivers and compiling took care of 99% of my video problems. The rest were ironed out by tweaking the settings in Xorg, etc.
 
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lxskllr said:
Ubuntu 8.04 works very well on my Eee900. The only slowdowns I get are when the HD gets written to; very noticeable with Firefox on the web. The 900 has a slow SSD is the reason. Otherwise things work well. I have full compiz effects enabled, and it works very smoothly.
Click to expand...

Firefox has a bug with the ext3 file system. Firefox calls some sync command every 5 seconds, which kills performance on the ext3 filesystem which apparently sychs everything on a sync command, instead of just the files/metadata of interest. Switch to a different file system (or just go to ubuntu 9.10 and use ext4) and the problem goes away. That, or use the chrome beta for linux, it's much faster than firefox.

BTW, I find XP is quite fast out of the box, but not very fast after you grab all the Windows updates and have all your drivers (likely a few with tray apps) installed. It gets just as bloated as vista in my experience at that point.
 
Fox5 said:
Firefox has a bug with the ext3 file system. Firefox calls some sync command every 5 seconds, which kills performance on the ext3 filesystem which apparently sychs everything on a sync command, instead of just the files/metadata of interest. Switch to a different file system (or just go to ubuntu 9.10 and use ext4) and the problem goes away. That, or use the chrome beta for linux, it's much faster than firefox.
Click to expand...

Courtesy of the PC-BSD testing mailing list:

I have been noticing a problem with Firefox for a while that's been driving me nuts.

Every 10 seconds the browser would freeze for several seconds - nothing would work, a mouse scroll, keyboard, nothing and a peek at the system load monitor showed high CPU activity during that time. The more windows and tabs I opened the longer the duration. The system buffer stored any activity with the keyboard and mouse and it would all get executed after the freeze but it was terribly annoying. Only FF had this problem, no other app.

FF does a session store every 10 seconds so that if you have a crash it saves the latest session data for your convenience. But it stops working during the time it's doing this save - why is anyone's guess.

The fix is to simply change that interval from 10 seconds to something much larger, like 5 minutes.

So if you have been annoyed by this, just type: about.config in the browser window, search for the entry "browser.sessionstore.interval", double click the entry, and change it from 10000 milliseconds to say, 300,000.

Problem solved. It's only really noticeable when you have lots of tabs and windows open in FF.
Click to expand...

Have a link for the chrome beta binaries?
 
Fox5 said:
Heh, switching to ext4 is probably a better fix.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
Here's the google chrome links. The .deb files are near the bottom of the page. Chrome actually works surprisingly well on Linux, probably the only browser that's faster on Linux than Windows. Now if only flash could get ironed out...
Click to expand...

doesnt ext4 still have some possibly significant write errors that can crop up with large files? I hope theyre rare, but it seems really weird to me to make that a default file system as often as people move around video files and such these days.
 
xSauronx said:
doesnt ext4 still have some possibly significant write errors that can crop up with large files? I hope theyre rare, but it seems really weird to me to make that a default file system as often as people move around video files and such these days.
Click to expand...

Does it? It's the default file system in ubuntu 9.10, and it's been marked as stable for about 2 years now by its maintainers iirc.
Are they permanent errors, or errors that will just be fixed by the automatic fsck on next boot?

Besides, ext3 can't even move around large files, it has a surprisingly low file size limit. It also has a low limit for the number of files in a directory.
 
xSauronx said:
doesnt ext4 still have some possibly significant write errors that can crop up with large files? I hope theyre rare, but it seems really weird to me to make that a default file system as often as people move around video files and such these days.
Click to expand...
How large are large files?
 
Windows XP is pretty snappy just after install. But after install SP2, all the other updates, and Antivirus, I think it's much more sluggish than Ubuntu. When using them on the same hardware, switching between OSes, I would say Ubuntu is faster.

Right now, I have a laptop running Ubuntu 9.10 and a desktop running Windows XP. My desktop is way beefier than my laptop in every way - more cpu cores, faster cpu core speed, more ram, faster hard drive, beefier video card, etc. but my Ubuntu laptop still has faster boot up, faster login, opens programs faster, and switches between programs faster. And this is with full compiz affects, added stuff to the Gnome panel, no speed "optimizations" that I can think of. Probably the biggest non-standard thing I do to my Ubuntu install is I use the XFS file system instead of ext3/4. This laptop was also originally installed with Intrepid and has been updated in place through Jaunty and now Karmic.

Now in long-running processes, the desktop would probably be faster. For instance if was converting a large video file or compressing a large amount of files. Stuff I expect to take several hours to complete would probably finish much faster on the desktop just because of it's hardware advantage. I don't come across those things very often. For web browsing, listeing to music, watching videos, word processing, Ubuntu is clearly snappier in my experience.

So that's my 2 cents.
 
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I absolutely LOVE linux for many reasons, but it's desktop environment is not one of them. Any linux on a netbook is painfully slow with terrible battery life. It's embarrassing that Windows 7 runs faster, looks better, and lasts longer. I even tried a minimal linux install of openbox + google chrome and that still was sluggish.

So I put Windows XP back on my netbook and it runs great. I installed cygwin + mintty for my linux command-line needs.
 
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