Seeking Help

[compdoc]

>- Computer has 32 GB of ram and an Intel i7 3770 CPU.
> Primary HDD is a Samsung 840 Pro (SSD)

Might want to see where the bottleneck is. 

Which ram do you have? Brand and model number. How many modules? If you have
two dimms, which slots are they in? What speed is the ram running?

Run memtest86+ and see what bandwidth is reported for the cpu caches and the
main ram. (in MB/s) Let the test run a couple of passes at least to see if
the ram is defective. 

For the drives, boot Ubuntu Live and use the Disk Utility to read the
drive's health according to SMART, and run the 'read only' Benchmark on each
drive. That SSD drive should nice speeds.

When you install Ubuntu, do you specify a partition layout manually, or just
let Ubuntu format the boot drive as it likes?

Do you automatically install packages that you've used for years, or is it a
pristine install? 

Do you change bios settings from the defaults for anything? If so, load
optimized or safe defaults and try.