zvi: self-portrait: short, fat, black dyke in bunny slippers (Default)
still kind of a stealthy love ninja ([personal profile] zvi) wrote in [community profile] linux4all2009-11-07 11:33 pm

Mysterious slowness

I upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic Koala, and all seemed to be okay for a while, and then I upgraded fifteen packages which were not upgraded, without first taking careful note of which packages those were. (Yes, I know, this isn't particularly clever, but it's always worked in the past.)

In any case, my desktop is now slow to the point of unusability. (I have some panel applets, tomboy, tasque, ubuntu one and dropbox going) but I can only open one cpu-intensive application at a time now, and it is painful to use; i.e. Firefox or Totem, pick one, and don't expect to get anything like work done.

When I look at top, I don't see any processes using lots of CPU cycles or memory except Xorg. (I don't know if Xorg normally uses lots of cpu/memory; I almost always run top as top -u, I only started running it for the whole system when the system started slowing down.)

Does anyone know of a good reference to explain what I'm seeing with top, or know of another way to find out why my computer is so slow, or have any suggestions generally?

Worst to worst, I can backup the home drive to my external hard drive and do a clean re-install, but I'd rather not.

[personal profile] feathertail 2009-11-08 02:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Are you using a machine with Intel integrated graphics?

When Jaunty came out, everyone using Intel graphics experienced a huge performance hit. Supposedly they'd fixed that in Karmic, but maybe they didn't.

There's a how-to for it here: LINK

I doubt if that is the problem, but it's one thing that comes to mind as a possibility!
onceamy: Dwight: showing off his legs. (Dwight-1)

[personal profile] onceamy 2010-04-03 10:10 am (UTC)(link)
(Not OP, just an interested partisan)

I totally didn't notice that - it would explain why on my Hardy desktop, every thing is a struggle!