[xubuntu-users] lack of memory?

Peter Flynn peter at silmaril.ie
Tue May 10 20:01:47 UTC 2016


On 05/10/2016 08:09 PM, Thomas Blasejewicz wrote:
> The fresh install of 16.04, where there is practically nothing added yet,
> is sooo slow by now, that even typing one word like "test" takes time!
> 
> Does that mean, my hardware is failing ... or is this just another
> shortcoming of xubuntu 16.04?

It's possible it's the hardware, but it may be a symptom of another
management failure that I omitted from my last rant.

It's now fashionable to design into the system a number of background
tasks that run invisibly but which take over practically all the
resources of the machine. I noticed last night when I fired up my laptop
that for the first 12 minutes it was almost completely absorbed in
running updatedb at full blast. The stock answer is to renice it, but
the real failing is that it should never have been allowed to execute
like that in the first place.

If your system has a disk-activity telltale, you may notice these things
because the light stays on bright for minutes on end.

The related problem is the primacy of the background. Designers feel
that the housekeeping tasks of a system or a package should be treated
as more important than user input. You can see this when a system
becomes slow or unresponsive: your application is doing something in the
background like reindexing something, writing incremental backups,
swapping portions of itself, or whatever, instead of putting cycles to
work looking at the mouse and keyboard *first* and *always*, and
prioritising user input *above everything else*. The designer is rightly
proud of the efficient or pragmatic way in which the system takes care
of itself, but that should never be a priority. Only in the most
desperate of panic circumstances should response be taken away from the
user.

When I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu many years ago I hoped that Ubuntu
would not fall into these traps, but it looks as if management is
unaware that the problems exist, which is a pity.

///Peter





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