Others Have Slow Experience with Ubuntu Xenial?

[ventrical]

+1
I usually wait untill then. I wanted to try 16.04 (Xubuntu) to test an app so, I installed it. I feel like a tester with the crashes and apport reports. Not my usual experience with first point releases.

Other than that, the system remains responsive. Memory has increased I noticed. I consider myself lucky in that this older designed system, (2007) with no dedicated graphic card that it runs so well on Xubuntu.

I get by with no proprietary drivers. I really didn't think I would use this system for another LTS release but, now I just might.

Addendum. After re-reading ventrical's and Graham's posts above, I might still buy my new i5 system this 14.04 LTS cycle and maybe put in a PCI-E Nvidia card in this older machine for testing. I learned some things in this thread and have some ideas.

mikodo@mikodo:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor    : 0
vendor_id    : GenuineIntel
cpu family    : 6
model        : 15
model name    : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU    Q6600  @ 2.40GHz
stepping    : 11
microcode    : 0xb3
cpu MHz        : 1596.000
cache size    : 4096 KB
physical id    : 0
siblings    : 4
core id        : 0
cpu cores    : 4
apicid        : 0

mikodo@mikodo:~$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3942         707        2324         114         910        2908
Swap:             0           0           0

mikodo@mikodo:~$ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:       +44.0°C  (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:       +44.0°C  (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:       +38.0°C  (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:       +38.0°C  (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

mikodo@mikodo:~$ top

top - 12:45:16 up 36 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.07, 0.09
Tasks: 206 total,   1 running, 204 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  1.7 us,  0.3 sy,  0.1 ni, 97.2 id,  0.7 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem :  4036992 total,  2370016 free,   727824 used,   939152 buff/cache
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 free,        0 used.  2967660 avail Mem

You would be surprised how a cheap 120GB SATAIII SSD hdd can bring an older SATAII system up to Speed.!! I have extra SamsungSSDIII and KingstonSSDIII that I use to swap in and swap out on older machines when I am in a hurry. Saves tons of downtime

Regards..

[mikodo]

You would be surprised how a cheap 120GB SATAIII SSD hdd can bring an older SATAII system up to Speed.!! I have extra SamsungSSDIII and KingstonSSDIII that I use to swap in and swap out on older machines when I am in a hurry. Saves tons of downtime

Regards..

I made up my mind today to put a nVidia card in this machine. I have been toying with the idea of putting in an Samsung SSD too. I've read what you have written about SSD's speeding up older machines before. It used to be that the 120 GIB Kingston was a lot slower than the 240 GIB ones or, so I had read. I could never bring myself to pay the money for the larger SSD especially since, the WD Black platter I have is doing quite well. I remember Welly Wu blogging about how he found the speed of his larger WD Black platter full of games being almost as fast as SSD drives were reported to be and that he felt the larger SSD's didn't warrant the return for the extra cost of them. He called the Black's "in the sweet spot", for him. But, I don't disbelieve your experience and since I have decided to keep this machine for testing and spend money on a dedicated video card, I'll consider a cheaper 120 GIB SSD for more speed too. I shouldn't need a lot of space for testing.

By testing, I don't mean a lot while I am still working. But, I do want to see Unity8, Ubuntu Snappy Core and snap-updates while that is materializing now, rather than later when it has matured. Maybe I can squeeze some time in for that.

Best Wishes.

[oldfred]

Five or six years ago, my then 5 year old system was getting to the point I was thinking of building a new system. It was a Core2 duo based desktop. Microcenter had a sale on a small 60GB SSD house brand SSD for less than $100. My hard drives were all older and figured I could use new SSD in new build.

But SSD sped up old system so much, that I could not justify to myself a new system, much less to my spouse. And that was a slow SSD.

Older SSD speed -T is cache, -t is device
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
USB2 flash drive
/dev/sde1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 50 MB in 3.07 seconds = 16.26 MB/sec

My now finally new SSD:

sudo lshw -C Disk -short
128GB Samsung SSD 840
Timing buffered disk reads: 1548 MB in 3.00 seconds = 515.85 MB/sec

But new hard drive is almost as fast as old SSD, but a lot slower than new SSD.

1TB WDC WD10EZEX-00B
/dev/sdb4:
Timing buffered disk reads: 514 MB in 3.00 seconds = 171.16 MB/sec

[mikodo]

Interesting oldfred, to see your comparisons, to kind of drive, age and size of SSD's.

From what I remember from a few years ago, when I was reading benchmarks of different SSD's, things have changed today. Then, Kingston SSD where then using a slower technology in their SSD 120 GiB but, had newer and faster technology for their 250 GiB and bigger ones than all other common SSD manufactures. Also, it seems the ideal of all manufactures is to use improved technology with newer drives. Hence, the improvements in speed and longevity.

http://superuser.com/questions/97708...-a-smaller-one

"you have to compare the same SSDs otherwise you compare apple and oranges. the amount of NAND chips impacts the speed: "With a hard drive, data is basically written serially, down a single channel. The stream may be interrupted by existing data, but ideally it's all written in a neat, uninterrupted line. Inside an SSD, data is written in a scattershot, parallel fashion down multiple channels to the multiple NAND chips at once. The more NAND chips an SSD has, the more channels it has to write/read across, and the faster the drive will be."

Seems, the larger the SSD Drive, the more NAND chips they generally have and with that the more channels, to read/write across. A design to enhance the larger SSD to accommodate more data being used with them.

My WD Black Platter drive:

/dev/sda5:
Timing buffered disk reads: 436 MB in 3.01 seconds = 144.65 MB/sec

Take care.

[yoshii]

No problems with slowness with 32-bit Ubuntu Studio v16.04 LTS on a circa 2015 AMD ENVY.
I'm actually kind of surprised at how fast it boots. Normal operation is fast too.

[ventrical]

I made up my mind today to put a nVidia card in this machine. I have been toying with the idea of putting in an Samsung SSD too. I've read what you have written about SSD's speeding up older machines before. It used to be that the 120 GIB Kingston was a lot slower than the 240 GIB ones or, so I had read. I could never bring myself to pay the money for the larger SSD especially since, the WD Black platter I have is doing quite well. I remember Welly Wu blogging about how he found the speed of his larger WD Black platter full of games being almost as fast as SSD drives were reported to be and that he felt the larger SSD's didn't warrant the return for the extra cost of them. He called the Black's "in the sweet spot", for him. But, I don't disbelieve your experience and since I have decided to keep this machine for testing and spend money on a dedicated video card, I'll consider a cheaper 120 GIB SSD for more speed too. I shouldn't need a lot of space for testing.

By testing, I don't mean a lot while I am still working. But, I do want to see Unity8, Ubuntu Snappy Core and snap-updates while that is materializing now, rather than later when it has matured. Maybe I can squeeze some time in for that.

Best Wishes.

You are always welcome to join the U+1 testing team.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/U+1/tester-w...de_Definitions

Regards..

[Liam_Murphy]

All good for me with Ubuntu Unity. I admittedly am using an SSD, so that helps out a ton.

[ventrical]

All good for me with Ubuntu Unity. I admittedly am using an SSD, so that helps out a ton.

To get the optimal performance it is always good to have current hardware form factors. However some distros of Ubuntu , e.g. Mate work really well on more legacy PCs circa 2006 and up but then there is always Xubuntu and Lubuntu which will run fast on standard dual cores back to machines 2004 and up.

Regards..

[sgian]

My computers with 4 GB of RAM or more all run noticeably faster on 16.04 than they did with 14.04. However there is a memory control problem with 16.04 which I could see slowing down older computers with less RAM, which makes 16.04 a memory hog in my experience. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1572801

So right now on the PC I am posting from, my system monitor in Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 is saying that I am using 2.1 GB out of my 7.9 GB of RAM with just Firefox and System Monitor open. So with a computer that only has 1 or 2 GB of RAM, this usage would cause the Swap Space on the hard drive to be used which will further slow down the computer.

That is the reason why I am waiting to install 16.04 on an old single core PC with 3 GB RAM that I am using as a minecraft server, until this memory control problem is fixed. I would recommend anyone with 2-3 GB or less of RAM to avoid Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity, Gnome, and XFCE also until this issue is fixed. I don't know if KDE or Lubuntu is affected, I'm going to start a new thread for that because 16.04 really is a lot faster if you have the resources to handle the memory hog aspect of 16.04.