Ubuntu 11.10 performance

[Carsten Agger]

This has taken some time to build up and it's the first time since 2005 
I've had so many problems with any version of Ubuntu, but I'm now 
officially annoyed with the performance in Oneiric.

First I had a problem with overheating and shortened battery life of my 
laptop, supposedly due to kernel problems with the onboard grafic 
module. After adjusting some boot parameters 
(http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/linux-power-regression-overheating-problem-on-thinkpad-fixed/) 
this has become a little better. At least the battery tends to last more 
than half an hour after a full recharge now ... but before I did that, 
the computer used about 10W more than usual when doing performance-low 
work and became unreasonably hot - as in, nearly get seriously burnt if 
you place it in your lap.

After that, it got better ... but still: Whereas Ubuntu 10.04 used to 
boot in about 30 seconds and was immediately responsive, 11.04 takes at 
least two minutes to become responsive in Unity or Gnome shell. After 
that, launching Firfox and Evolution takes more than a minute.

And that's with a quad core CPU and 4 GB of RAM!

At first, part of the problem was caused by the Ubuntu One client 
apparently looping and using 100% of one CPU. I solved this (kinda) by 
uninstalling the client and reinstalling it a couple of weeks later.

Later, heating and boot times became significantly worse because gwibber 
was eating up all the CPU after boot. Which is something of a mystery, 
because I have never used it and so have never configured any accounts. 
Something is wrong if the desktop awards 100% of CPU time to a program 
the user has never opened ...

SO, I managed to improve this situation by uninstalling gwibber 
completely. This has the drawback of uninstalling the ubuntu-desktop 
virtual package, but I did want to get rid of gwibber :-)

And all of this has improved things. But the laptop still overheats, and 
the battery still won't last an hour on a full recharge where it's 
supposed to last about two.

The other day, I tried booting pure:dyne based on Ubuntu 8.10 (I think, 
or 9.04) from a USB stick. It *flew*! Quick boot, immediately 
responsive, no overheating, nice battery life.

This is not to troll or to award any unreasonable criticism at Ubuntu, 
but I'm really not happy about the performance in 11.10 and hope boot 
and launch times as well as power consumption will be top priorities in 
12.04. I like the Unity interface, but right now it seems to carry a 
heavy price tag :-)

But can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong, or has anyone had similar 
experiences with performance in 11.04?