[Techtalk] Ubuntu 10.4 LTS
Carla Schroder
carla at bratgrrl.com
Thu Jul 15 16:30:25 UTC 2010
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.
Carla
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