What could possibly be the problem?

[AtlantaBob]

Ok, I have an old Dell SC420 that I use at work as a Linux computer. It's 2.53GHz Celeron with 2 GB of RAM.

It's running Ubuntu 9.04 (Gnome). It's not used for much, so speed isn't a big concern, but lately, things have been getting worse. I was just typing a message on Facebook using Firefox 3.0.14 -- the text was appearing so slowly on the screen that the words were appearing on the screen 10-15 seconds after I was typing them. On this forum, there's definitely a lag, but it's not quite as bad. Gmail also shows the same problem. My first guess is that there's some sort of a problem running Javascript-heavy webpages.

When I go into System Monitor, the graph shows that the CPU is pegged at 100%; however, by looking at the individual processes (sorted by % use), it appears that Firefox is only using about 35% of the processor -- with other tools, including System Monitor taking up maybe another 25% (if that!)

I keep everything updated.... any suggestions as to what's making it run SO slow? Anything I can try to do to fix it?

Thanks very much in advance.

 

[Nothinman]

Do other browsers have the same problem?

 

[AtlantaBob]

Nothinman - Thanks! you know, that's one of those such basic questions that I completely forgot about it. Ack! My apologies. I'm going to be traveling most of the later part of this week and next, so it may be some time before I can answer that definitively, but I'll definitely try one or two tomorrow in the AM if I get the chance.

Interesting non-sequitor, I was testing out a mySql database with a few hundred thousand records and some bad organization (which I have since tried to resolve) -- and the Celeron was actually faster (by a good bit) than a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop (also with 2 GB of RAM). Just seems odd that it can perform that well on "simple" tasks and then perform so poorly on web-browsing.

 

[Nothinman]

I browse mostly with Ephiphany right now and FF always seems to be a bit less responsive so I think it's worth a try.

 

[sourceninja]

Do you have firebug installed and enabled? I've had horrible slowness sometimes due to firebug being enabled.

 

[AtlantaBob]

Hi guys. As it turns out, I didn't make it to the office today, so I can't say anything, but I'll definitely try out Ephiphany and see how that goes. Sourceninja, thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have any addons/plugins installed (with the exception of the horrible flashplayer). Like I say, it may take me a while to answer just because I'm traveling, but thanks for taking the time to read and suggest.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Firefox in linux has always been horribly slow for me.

 

[GundamSonicZeroX]

Do you have any pages with Flash running? Flash in Linux uses more resources than its Windows counterpart. Also, how much HD space do you have left? If you have %<15 HD space left, Linux can run really slow.

 

[Fox5]

1. Upgrade to a newer version of firefox, the javascript engine gets a huge boost in performance.

2. Flash will kill performance quite fast in linux.

3. Firefox in linux has a bug on ext3. Convert to another file system (ideally ext4) or switch to ext3 writeback.