[ubuntu-uk] Ubuntu unusably slow

[Gareth France]

On 07/02/13 16:55, Raul Landa wrote:
> On Thu 07 Feb 2013 16:25:31 GMT, Gareth France wrote:
>> On 07/02/13 16:20, Colin Law wrote:
>>> On 7 February 2013 15:55, Gareth France <gareth.france at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 07/02/13 15:50, Alan Pope wrote:
>>>>> On 07/02/13 15:12, Colin Law wrote:
>>>>>> On 7 February 2013 14:18, Alan Pope <alan.pope at canonical.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> On 07/02/13 12:47, Gareth France wrote:
>>>>>>>> I've just had a peek and apparently it's using swap memory right
>>>>>>>> now!
>>>>>>>> Memory 1.5Gb of 3.5Gb used
>>>>>>>> Swap 658.9Mb of 3.7Gb used
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Using swap is not a problem. Swapping is the problem.
>>>>>> It is unusual though to see half a gig in swap when less than half of
>>>>>> the RAM is is use, is it not?  For example mine has been on all day
>>>>>> and is still showing zero swap (I have 4GB RAM).  Does it not mean
>>>>>> that at some point something has been using a lot?
>>>>>>
>>>>> Not necessarily. It means some was _allocated_. Doesn't mean the
>>>>> box was
>>>>> swapping heavily. I am not inclined to take those numbers at face
>>>>> value. I'd
>>>>> rather see the first 10 lines from top pasted.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Ask and ye shall receive.
>>>> www.cliftonts.co.uk/top.png
>>> Do you have a vast library of music, possibly on an external drive or
>>> something?  Google shows that, at least historically,
>>> unity-music-daemon and the music lens have been problematic in their
>>> use of resources.
>>>
>>> By the way, you can use Ctrl-Shift-C to copy out of the terminal.
>>>
>>> Colin
>>>
>>>> --
>>>> ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com
>>>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
>>>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
>> I wasn't sure about copying from a terminal output that won't sit
>> still. Yes my library is very large but shrinking. I used to be a DJ
>> and now I've stopped I have a copy of all my music on the hard drive,
>> whenever a song I don't like plays I delete it. I don't expect the end
>> result to be too big. I did wonder if that might be the cause of the
>> gaps in playback. It doesn't however explain why my antique laptop
>> coped with that or any of the other related issues that happen even
>> when I'm not playing music. Although I understand that the lenses in
>> unity run all the time at the moment, I did think perhaps the new
>> approach in 13.04 might be lighter on the resources.
>>
> What about looking at disk accesses directly with _iotop_? Maybe you
> could install it and run it to see if some process might be
> reading/writing to the disk even if not inducing a large CPU load. Some
> time ago I had some issues with a defective hard disk and
> tracker-miner. iotop helped me a lot; it can be used with the other
> suggestions in the thread to troubleshoot excessive swapping.
>
>
I don't know that program, sounds like it could be an interesting 
experiment. Thanks