Slow Performance

[hatebreed]

I don't know the answer to the question but I'm have the same issues. Getting alot of lag out of all my apps.

[hatebreed]

I have a geforce 3 with the 96 series driver and all my videos streaming or on the hard drive lag really bad. I've got 450 meg of ram, 120 meg free, dual p2 400, running ubuntu 10.04. Why does ubuntu seem so boggy?

[hatebreed]

isn't there a video and audio buffer setting for the kernel that one could set to remedy this problem? I've done a lot of searching and can't find an answer to this. It seems that this is a really big problem with linux in general and i'm very surprised that no one has a fix for it.

[devils casper]

Have you installed Nvidia? What is the status of Nvdia Driver at System -- Administration -- Hardware Drivers?
Post the output these commands :

grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
free
df -h

[hatebreed]

here are the outputs

driver output:
Driver "mouse"
Driver "kbd"
Driver "nvidia"

free output:
total used free shared buffers cached
444500 435220 9280 0 568 48696
-/+ buffers/cache: 385956 58544
swap: 1445776 179160 1266616

df -h output:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 8.3G 6.0G 2.0G 76% /
none 213M 300K 213M 1% /dev
none 218M 1.6M 216M 1% /dev/shm
none 218M 192K 217M 1% /var/run
none 218M 0 218M 0% /var/lock
none 218M 0 218M 0% /lib/init/rw

[hatebreed]

Now it's saying I only have 9 meg free, what the H!!! How can the OS be using that much memory. All I have running is opera and firefox.

[HROAdmin26]

Why does ubuntu seem so boggy?

Because you have a new OS installed on 10-year-old hardware. You also have "450 MB" of *slow* RAM...and are 170MB into your paging file - which is disk space on your *slow* HDD.

Ubuntu Documentation

A Pentium 4, 1GHz system is the minimum recommended for a desktop system.

Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install Type RAM (minimal) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive
No desktop 64 megabytes 256 megabytes 1 gigabyte
With Desktop 64 megabytes 512 megabytes 5 gigabytes

It is possible to run a graphical desktop environment on older or low-end systems, but in that case it is recommended to install a window manager that is less resource-hungry than those of the GNOME or KDE desktop environments; alternatives include xfce4, icewm and wmaker, but there are others to choose from.

[hatebreed]

Why though? I've had xp, 2000, 2003 server on this system and never had issues. This is not a system issue but rather a software issue. there is no way that the OS and 2 apps running should take up 450 meg of ram, that is rediculous.

[hatebreed]

I realize this is an older system but that is no excuse. Wasn't linux supposed to be very scalable. I thought one of the benifits of linux was you could use it on older hardware as well as newer hardware.

[HROAdmin26]

So you're upset that Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't run well on hardware that....Ubuntu says it won't run well on?

Ubuntu Req's:
1GHz CPU
512MB RAM
5GB HDD

Windows 7 Req's:
1GHz CPU
1GB RAM
16GB HDD

So, yeah, check. (And I would question MSFT's 1GHz "minimum" - that would be painfully slow.) I have Debian installed on a Pentium 133 - it runs great. With a desktop GUI? No - not with 64MB RAM and that old CPU.

I've had xp, 2000, 2003 server on this system and never had issues.

8, 10, and 7 years old. A Linux distro from 2003 would have no problems on your hardware.

Google: light linux distro

Zenwalk
Damn Small Linux
Puppy Linux

...would all run fine on your hardware. As mentioned by the Ubuntu docs, these use alternative desktops GUI's to GNOME/KDE.