[Techtalk] Ubuntu 10.4 LTS

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 15 July 2010 08:18:51 am Billie Walsh wrote:
>> On 07/15/2010 09:37 AM, rathgild at gmail.com wrote:
>> > I've finally taken the plunge and upgraded to Ubuntu 10.4 and I'm
>> > seriously wishing I hadn't.  Since the upgrade my system is running about
>> > as slow as a snail on valium.  I'm not doing anything particularly taxing
>> > (running thunderbird, xchat, a web browser, and the occasional bout of
>> > einstein's game) and my machine has a duel core AMD processor with 1GB
>> > ram.  It's been more than adequate until the upgrade, but now is behaving
>> > as though it on it's last legs.
>> >
>> > Is this just me or have Canonical lost the plot and developed a bloatware
>> > distribution?

Is compiz on? (desktop effects in the 'appearance' options) If so, try
turning it off. If you have a crappy videocard you'll be loading a lot
of textures into main memory, possibly causing that 1 gig to fill up
fast.

You could also try installing iotop and running that. Usually if a
system seems slow, it's because of trashing on the disk. This could be
by running out of memory (going into swap) or having some very IO
intensive process running.

> Akonadi seems like an obese, unwieldy locate alternative. Is this really so
> hard?
>
> 1. Run "sudo updatedb" periodically to stay up to date
> 2. Use "locate foo" to find files
>
> locate uses an index of all the files on your system, so locate searches are
> very fast. 'sudo updatedb' will bog down older systems while it is running,
> but on modern systems it's fast and hardly noticeable. Anyway you run it when
> you want to, not when it wants to. 'man locate' and 'man updatedb' tell more.

akonadi (if it is like the other indexing systems) doesn't just index
file names, it indexes content as well. A bit heavy on the machine but
most people use files all the time and it can be handy to just type in
'chocolate chip cookie recipe' and get your recipe and some bookmarks
you made on a cooking site.

I don't use it anymore atm (ran beagle and tracker for a while, but
they had some problems), but I kinda get the idea. When it works,
anyway.

cheers,
Wim