Dear All,
I've been having serious performance issues since I installed Ubuntu 13.04. Strangely, I haven't found any guidance about this when searching the Forum so far, nor from a Google search. All I see is discussion of performance problems of at least three years ago, and raves about how much faster 13.04 supposedly is.
When I scroll the launcher or use ALT-Tab to switch among windows (is that what's now called "the Lens"?), things move jumpily and with delay. This makes it harder to switch to the right program.
Unity's launcher icons don't usually show with those little notches which programs are already open, as they had consistently done in 12.04. I was seeing them occasionally a few days ago, now not at all.
Opening a 1.1 MB spreadsheet file in LibreOffice now takes 81 seconds. I didn't time it in 12.04, but I think it took maybe a quarter or a fifth as long. I tried changing LibreOffice's memory settings to increase memory use, but it still takes 81 seconds to open the file.
In Softmaker Office, there is a little delay between typing each key and the character appearing on screen. This distracts me and makes it hard for me to type. (Actually, this is even starting to happen a little in gedit.) Also, boldface letters do not show in boldface.
Opening an 83k WAV file with "Videos" (isn't this the same old Totem program?) gives me garbled, incomprehensible audio. (But with VLC Media player it works fine, and playing a DVD in "Videos" seems to basically work, with just a little jumping as I select things in the DVD menu.)
Using FontForge, now whenever I generate a font it has kerning errors -- as if the program is running out of memory or something.
Many Youtube videos play badly, stopping frequently even though my DSL download speed still tests at 11-12Mb/s. Some other videos online play a little choppy.
Sound from a radio stream running in Audacious cuts out and sometimes shuts off, especially when I'm switching among different windows.
I recently uninstalled five different things from Unity: photo previews, Amazon, Ubuntu One music, etc. I see some performance improvement after doing so, but it's still not great.
I am mystified about why performance is so bad with 13.04, and why this problem doesn't seem to be affecting anyone else. I basically have a default installation of Ubuntu, on a fairly high-powered, not-very-old, computer that was designed and built just for Linux (specs below in footer). Looking at the System Monitor, I never see memory usage going up to half capacity, though it often stays a little over one-third. When I open Rhythmbox or a large spreadsheet, both CPUs go up close to 50%, although on the System Monitor's graphic display on the Resources tab, they seem to go close to 100%, off and on, during that time.
My root partition is 6.7 GB, or 60%, full. I originally sized it at 8GB but had to expand it to 12 when it was getting 97% full. My /tmp partition right now is at 3%. Looking at processes in the System Monitor, right now gnome-system-monitor is taking the most CPU, at 6%. Occasionally other process shoot up higher, around 20%
Could it be a video driver issue? (I use a Gateway 17" monitor from 2006). Or just a bunch of separate issues? These problems get worst most when I have plenty of programs open (at the moment I have eight program windows open, and I often go up to twelve). But according to the System Monitor, I'm hardly using the resources that are available on my computer.
At the same time, I do see one performance improvement compared to 12.04:
Opening a small file in LibreOffice, like 25k, is much faster now -- almost instantaneous.
(I don't see any noticeable change in bootup time.)
I want to make some little adjustment to make everything work better. If this is actually just a whole bunch of separate issues (in addition to the many bugs I'm seeing in programs such as Rhythmbox), then I'll probably install 12.04 in my other root partition. But I'm reluctant to do that, since reinstalling is incredibly time-consuming.
Thanks for any insights.
Scott
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