[Techtalk] Ubuntu 10.4 LTS

[Carla Schroder]

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?
> >
> > Jan
> > Edinburgh
> >    
>
> There's been a lot of chatter on the (K)Ubuntu lists about this problem.
> It has to do with your system being indexed by, I believe, Akonadi [
> spelling ??? ]. It seems to hit some systems harder than others. Many
> have experienced extremem slow downs and some, like me, don't even
> notice it. Some have turned it off to stop it but it slows down the
> "Find" process when turned off.
>
> Not the solution but points in the right direction I hope.

Run the 'top' command to see what is using the most system resources. The 
heavy hitters are always at the top:

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 1183 root      20   0  317m 216m  14m S    2  5.5   7:02.53 Xorg               
 1594 alrac     20   0  210m  15m  10m S    0  0.4   0:02.24 gnome-terminal     
 1712 alrac     20   0  661m 178m  30m S    0  4.5   4:51.02 firefox-bin  

It continually updates until you press q to stop it, so you can monitor it 
over a few minutes to see what is going on. 

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.

On many linux system 'locate' is aliased to 'locate -i', which runs a 
case-insensitive search. It is not on Ubuntu, so you do a case-insensitive 
search with 'locate -i foo'. You can easily learn if you have any aliased 
commands by running 'alias', like this:

$ alias
alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'
alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

All those commands are aliased to the option that colorizes their output.

I would turn off the fancy 3D bling if you're using any, though that shouldn't 
bother a system with your specs. 

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