New Install - Very slow at "Reading package lists..." in apt-get

[thisismyusername4now]

I was running Ubuntu 12.10 on an older computer but on Friday I gathered a stack of new equipment and excitedly assembled a fresh new machine.

The new machine has Intel i7, 32 GB ram, and a Samsung SSD (Pro 840). This should be a speedy machine.

The Ubuntu install was very slow (took 6 hours, most of that was spent transferring from the CD to the SDD).

After rebooting I noticed that performance was not great, so I went through the standard SSD tweaks and now I get very high numbers for both read and write.

Performance is great except for one occasion, "apt-get update", or software center.

I develop code under contract using this computer, so I primarily use the command line. However when I execute the update command "apt-get update" it has a performance issue.

After downloading all the files it gets to the section of "Reading package lists..." and takes several minutes. I wrote this post and it is still going. I would estimate that it is more than 10 minutes. My old AMD Athon computer did this same process in seconds. Something is wrong.

Anyone else ever experience a similar problem?

[another1LinuxUser]

Have the same problem. It might not be that slow as you described it, but everytime using apt "reading package lists ... " takes about a minute or more. The installation also took quite long (longer than I experienced so far).

My machine looks like this:
intel i7, 24 Gig RAM and 2 SSDs - one for / and one for /home. (Corsair CSSD-F60GB2).

I installed the 12.10 several day's ago. With 12.04 I did not have had this problem.


By the way, what did you do, to speed up your system - regarding the SSD's?

br

[SlugSlug]

6 hours to install is crazy! What internet speed you got as am hoping its awful and the 6 hours was due to pulling in updates.

Not sure if this is the issue you face but try hash our all the deb-src entries in

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

eg

# deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner

[oldfred]

My system is a 6 year old dual core with 4GB of RAM. It took about 9 minutes to install to my new SSD a year ago and new clean installs take about the same amount of time. I do install from ISO on hard drive to SSD.

My Internet is fairly fast but it does take 10 to 20 minutes to download updates depending on how old ISO is to current and most of my configuration is now scripted so I have a full working install in about an hour.
But even on my old laptop with hard drive from flash drive installed in 20 to 30 minutes.

Something is really wrong if it is taking that much time.

Is system in BIOS or UEFI mode? IF BIOS do you have AHCI on?

Have you partitioned in advance or just used auto install?

Is UEFI/BIOS up to date and SSDs version?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD_Benchmarking

New SSDs have twice the speed as my low cost year old one.

SSD speed
fred@fred-Precise:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdd4
/dev/sdd4:
Timing buffered disk reads: 626 MB in 3.01 seconds = 208.20 MB/sec
Older 160GB rotating drive:
/dev/sdb4:
Timing buffered disk reads: 212 MB in 3.01 seconds = 70.46 MB/sec

[thisismyusername4now]

My system is a 6 year old dual core with 4GB of RAM. It took about 9 minutes to install to my new SSD a year ago and new clean installs take about the same amount of time. I do install from ISO on hard drive to SSD.

My Internet is fairly fast but it does take 10 to 20 minutes to download updates depending on how old ISO is to current and most of my configuration is now scripted so I have a full working install in about an hour.
But even on my old laptop with hard drive from flash drive installed in 20 to 30 minutes.

Something is really wrong if it is taking that much time.

Is system in BIOS or UEFI mode? IF BIOS do you have AHCI on?

Have you partitioned in advance or just used auto install?

Is UEFI/BIOS up to date and SSDs version?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD_Benchmarking

New SSDs have twice the speed as my low cost year old one.

SSD speed
fred@fred-Precise:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdd4
/dev/sdd4:
Timing buffered disk reads: 626 MB in 3.01 seconds = 208.20 MB/sec
Older 160GB rotating drive:
/dev/sdb4:
Timing buffered disk reads: 212 MB in 3.01 seconds = 70.46 MB/sec

I started the install at 1:30 pm Saturday afternoon and walked away at 2:00. I came back every half hour or so to check on it... but it really took until 6:00 pm to finish. I guess that is not quite 6 hours, but it took a long time. I was so excited to see the performance of the new hardware.... this was not fun.

I partitioned in advance. SSD is '/' and a 1TB platter is '/home/'.

Good call on the BIOS revision. I checked and I am using a Gigabyte GA-P75-D3 and it has revision 3 of the BIOS. The current stable revision is 9 (beta is 10). I will try to install revision 9 now.

As for the SSD, is there a way to check the firmware revision from Linux?

Originally I had the system setup with IDE mode (BIOS came that way by default, but I switched it to AHCI which did not help.

Here is what I got from hdparam:
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 656 MB in 3.38 seconds = 194.06 MB/sec

ran it a second time:
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.04 seconds = 21.04 MB/sec

That does not bode well....

[oldfred]

Trim does not work unless you have AHCI on.

New partition tools should set partition alignment correctly. All partitions starts should be divisible by 8. First partition start should be sector 2048.

You may need to clean up SSD.

I did not correctly enable trim with first install, so I ran this:
fred@fred-Precise:~$ sudo fstrim -v /
/: 23267893248 bytes were trimmed

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._Cell_Clearing
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdX
Alternate to discard, call fstrim via cron
http://opensuse.14.n6.nabble.com/SSD...td3313048.html
test if trim working using hdparm
http://techgage.com/article/enabling..._under_linux/2

[thisismyusername4now]

6 hours to install is crazy! What internet speed you got as am hoping its awful and the 6 hours was due to pulling in updates.

Not sure if this is the issue you face but try hash our all the deb-src entries in

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

eg

# deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner

Thank-you for the suggestion, but I do not think it has to do with the internet speed. I am on a 10 mbps connection and the download portion of any Ubuntu updates is very fast. It seems to have something to do with the local machine.

[thisismyusername4now]

By the way, what did you do, to speed up your system - regarding the SSD's?

Here are the instructions that I used to optimize Ubuntu for the SSD

http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-t...r-performance/

Sorry that yours is running slow, though I wish mine was done in a few minutes

[AvengerX9]

I got this problem too. Dont have any SSD though, but I'm on a quad core pentium with 8gb of ram. Whatever I do it takes ages. Like an hour to install mysql from the command line. Did apt-get upgrade like 15 minutes ago and its still there reading packages and unpacking. In my signature you can see my latest speed test

[oldfred]

It is a bit strange your upload speed is faster than download. But your download speed is faster than mine and my downloads are pretty quick.

Are you connecting to a local mirror? The choose best server is based on ping, not downloads, so sometimes you have to experiment.
On update manager, lower left corner settings button, Ubuntu Software tab, download from combo box, choose other, then select best server.

You can also use top to see if some task is consumming system resources. I keep a tiny processor system monitor in my top panel. (I use gnome-fallback or gnome-panel, so I can add that to top panel.) Or just look at System Monitor to see what does not look correct.