12.04 performance????

[jcs3rdma]

Hello,

Let me know if this is the wrong place to ask this question......

I was another happy 10.04 LTS user. As suggested by the Ubuntu upgrade section, I waited and finally upgraded to 12.04 LTS in Sept.
There have been no hardware changes.

Now performance "su*ks"
10.04 - desktop/system/web performance screamed. Better than any Windows version.
12.04 - desktop/system performance is sluggish. 5-15 seconds for an application to open. Web performance is jittery and web streaming video is choppy at times.

Any helpful suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
thx, John.

[funicorn]

You can blame the desktop thing to unity, and the others to linux kernel, both of which have gotten serious regression in certain aspects.

[snowpine]

Hi John, a good first step is to identify your hardware, especially CPU, RAM, and graphics card. (you can use the terminal command 'lspci' if you're not sure about the latter.) Then you might want to do a forum Search (top right corner of the screen) for your specific graphics chipset to see if anyone has posted a fix.

As an educational aside, the computer hardware industry is driven by a force called "Moore's Law." This postulates that hardware capability doubles every 18 months. If you upgrade your operating system but do not upgrade your hardware, then your performance will drop with each iteration because you are not keeping pace with developments. This would be true whether you are using Linux, WIndows, or Mac.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

[funicorn]

That's not true, at least for Microsoft OS ...

[jcs3rdma]

Thanks for the reply Snowpine.

While you make a good point, I have always been under the impression that the "Linux" community tries to work outside that generalization.
If 10.04 works really well, then what did they do to degrade the performance in 12.04? How can we fix it and avoid as "funicorn" states "the serious regressions"?

I have been a huge fan of Ubuntu since 7.04 and until this 12.04 release, I have always been impressed with each release.

I even went as far as loading the Xubuntu desktop and while it was a little better than Unity, it still was nothing as good as 10.04.

Please don't tell me that we have to buy new hardware with each new version.
That would be no different than Windows!

thanks, john

[8grod]

I noticed that the composting eye-candy has become more CPU intensive.
If you have composting enabled, try either scaling down the number of effects you are using or maybe even try turning them off.

[jcs3rdma]

Thanks 8grod, anything turned on will be whatever is done by default.
I haven't done anything or even thought about Compiz or composting eye-candy.
Is it even needed? I will look into this more tomorrow.
thanks again.

[8grod]

No prob.

Compositing isn't necessary at all. It certainly creates a pleasant visual experience but isn't critical. I run a tower with 12.10 on it but with no effects. Did I mention that that tower is an old AMD Duron 933 mhz?
Yup, 12.10 runs well without the eye candy.

[snowpine]

While you make a good point, I have always been under the impression that the "Linux" community tries to work outside that generalization.

I've never got the impression that Canonical was concerned in the least with Ubuntu's performance on old hardware. They are content to let Puppy, TinyCore, Slitaz, etc. go after that unprofitable niche market. (Customers who won't spend a few $$ on new hardware perodically are unlikely to purchase expensive Canonical support plans.)


If 10.04 works really well, then what did they do to degrade the performance in 12.04?

Unity.


How can we fix it and avoid as "funicorn" states "the serious regressions"?

1. use Unity 2D
or
2. don't use Unity at all
or
3. buy new hardware capapble of running Unity
or
4. don't use Ubuntu... branch out and explore the lovely world of Debian/Fedora/Red Hat/Slackware/etc. :)

[dannyboy79]

thanks for letting me know this. I am happily still running 10.04 on all my machines since the hardware in them is plenty old. Fastest current machine I have is a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB DDRII ram and a MX420 Nvidia Graphics card. I'll stick with 10.04 till I upgrade hardware.