1

I have Xubuntu 13.04 on an old Dell Inspiron with 1 GB RAM and about 2 GB swap.

Each time I launch an application (e.g. Thunar or Evince) it takes a pretty long time to be launched and I see a lot of disk reads/writes.

If the system was short on memory, this would be understandable as the system would use swap. But that's not the case in my situation (i.e. I have this problem even when the RAM is almost empty).

I had the same problem with this laptop with an older version of Ubuntu as well. Maybe the problem is with the old ATA drive?

Reza
  • 1,255

1 Answers1

0

Most probably the settings of swappiness would be the key. Ubuntu by default is set to swap the system resources before (not after) it will need to swap it. Fortunately, this option, as all things in Linux world, is configurable. Try to disable swap temporarily, to test, if this will help you, by 

sudo swapoff -a

and later back on with

sudo swapon -a

If this will be the solution for you, you can play with swappiness settings. This Q/A should be good guide for you (Is it safe to turn swap off permanently? ).

... and yes, problem could be the old ATA drive, respectively the drive controller, as the I/O operations take longer than expected and system is waiting for it. Try to monitor system with top command, if this is the case, there will be lot of CPU waits (values more than 15-20%). You have to test it with app, which is not yet loaded into memory.

If this is the case, then consider to reduce I/O as much as possible. Play with swappiness (for example zero). It would help to add more RAM then, should have to be possible to increase it to at least 2Gigs.

Community
  • 1
Dee
  • 1,986