Slow computer is slooooooooow

December 23, 2008 8:09 PM

[FixMyComputerFilter] What's causing my computer to slow down to a crawl? Details inside

About a year ago, I purchased a used HP TC1100 tablet. The hard drive was wiped before I got it, and I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Everything was great for about a month, then things started getting ugly. When I first boot the computer, everything is fine. When I start to use certain programs (Opera, Firefox, The Gimp), the computer starts slooooowing down, and within 5 minutes is absolutely unusable; it will take several seconds to even process a mouse movement, and the only solution is to restart the computer.

Here are a few specifics.

• Programs that trigger the slowdown: Gimp, Firefox, Opera, Open Office.
• Programs that aren't a problem: Minesweeper, minor games, Remote connection to another computer, instant messaging.
• According to a top report, there's nothing hogging the CPU, and CPU usage is never above 50%.
• Intel Pentium M 733 / 1.1 GHz
• 512MB RAM
• 40GB hard drive
• Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Since it's a tablet PC, it's pretty much impossible for me to access any of the insides without tearing it completely to pieces. Before I do that, can anyone offer me a suggestion as to which hardware I might be looking to replace? Is it possible that it's some kind of software problem that I can't think of? At this point, all I can really use the computer for is remotely connecting to my desktop, which is neat, but not really what I had in mind when I got the computer; if I can fix this with an afternoon of tinkering and a few new sticks of RAM, I'll gladly do it.

Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

posted by specialagentwebb to computers & internet (19 comments total)

This seems like it might be more of a software problem than a hardware problem, but if it were a hardware problem I'd think it would either be bad RAM or overheating. To check the former, try running memtest86 (may be available on your Ubuntu LiveCD or on your GRUB bootmenu). For the latter, you can try running the 'sensors' program from the lm_sensors package (try 'sudo apt-get install lm-sensors' and then 'sensors' to see if it works out of the box, otherwise you may want to do a google).

If it's a software problem, it might be a memory leak or some program misbehaving with system resources. Have you kept your packages and their dependent libraries up to date? Not sure exactly how you do things with Ubuntu, but generally with apt you use:

apt-get update

For all packages:
apt-get upgrade

For individual packages (e.g. firefox:
apt-get install mozilla-firefox

Check your system documentation for details.
posted by ayerarcturus at 8:35 PM on December 23, 2008

How much RAM does it have? Some versions of Firefox are legendary for having fire-hose sized memory leaks, and that can cause a system to thrash.

As to GIMP, if your RAM is limited and you try to process large pictures, that too will make the system thrash. (Also long undo lists can really hammer memory.)

Office apps also tend to use a lot of RAM. Any program that tries to use more than you have will make performance slow to a crawl because it'll spend all its time swapping memory pages to disk.

So I ask what I think is the critical question: how much RAM do you have? You may not have enough to do the things you're trying to do.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:55 PM on December 23, 2008 [2 favorites]

By the way, a diagnosis of thrashing is consistent with low CPU usage because the CPU spends all its time waiting for disk transfers.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:57 PM on December 23, 2008 [1 favorite]

Adding memory is always a good idea. Your tablet will support two gigs of memory total. There are two slots that can support a, 1GB 333MHz DDR SDRAM laptop profile memory stick in each slot.

Wikipedia says that the memory bay is easily accessed. You can get this memory at NewEgg for $30 that will work just fine and it'll make your system a LOT more responsive.
posted by lockle at 9:19 PM on December 23, 2008

Yeah, it's thrashing.

Run 'top' from a shell... this will help you identify the memory hogs.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:01 PM on December 23, 2008

What kind of graphics card do you have? Ubuntu has, at times, had some problems with my ATI card that would eventually lead to sort of lag you describe. Works flawlessly on the most recent version, Intrepid Ibex. Is there a reason you're using such an old version of Ubuntu? Upgrading might get everything working better in a flash, in my experience.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:03 PM on December 23, 2008

Somehow I missed that you said you had 512 MB. That probably isn't enough.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:11 PM on December 23, 2008 [1 favorite]

Nthing that you're probably short on RAM. Two years ago, I went from 512 to 1GB (running Ubuntu), and it's made a world of difference.
posted by chrisamiller at 11:09 PM on December 23, 2008

Sounds very much like you're RAM-bound. 512Mb really isn't enough any more. You could try using Xubuntu, and a lighter browser but GIMP is always going to struggle. The real answer is to install more RAM.
posted by pompomtom at 11:31 PM on December 23, 2008

Thirding or fourthing doubling (or maxing out) your RAM to solve your problem. It used to be that 25 or 512 MB was plenty. These days you need 1 or 2 GB. The more the better.
posted by singingfish at 12:16 AM on December 24, 2008

Get more RAM.
posted by KokuRyu at 1:15 AM on December 24, 2008

I'd say RAM as well, I'm feeling your pain my laptop runs to 750Mb and that still has a thrashing problem on occasions.. If you want to get a more detailed look at what is going on take a look at Dstat. You should be able to apt-get it. Run it as dstat -aiml in a wide terminal.
posted by tallus at 2:58 AM on December 24, 2008

Nthing RAM. Just using gnome (the default ubuntu desktop environment) on a computer with 512 mb RAM is enough to make it feel sluggish, and it doesn't take much to push it into unusably slow thrashing. 512 mb of RAM is the bare minimum for ubuntu with the default gnome desktop. It is not hard to use a desktop other than gnome with ubuntu, and I recommend trying it.

This is getting into opinionated linux-dweeb flamewar territory, but I used to have this problem all the time, and I got hooked on my workaround, and now I sit here with 2 gigs of RAM running evilwm+rox-filer instead of gnome on my ubuntu eeepc (I don't even have it installed, I have better things I can do with the half a gig or so of drive space it wants to use). Evilwm just makes sense: if you only need to do 8 things to a window, why have buttons and drag handles and icons and panels for it instead of 8 keyboard shortcuts? And it uses 1/3rd the RAM of a single instance of the bash shell on my system. But, for those who need a "normal" desktop experience, icewm and blackbox are not bad, even if they are feature-creeped RAM-hogs by comparison. Also, there is something refreshingly old-school UNIX about evilwm not having a .evilwm file (or god forbid a whole configuration DIRECTORY)- there are two ways to configure it: a small number of command line flags, and editing the source code. (warning - if you don't know how to use your computer without the gnome menus and tools buying lots of RAM and putting up with the sluggishness of its overengineered monstrosity is easier than learning how to use your computer).
posted by idiopath at 5:29 AM on December 24, 2008

My dual 500 mhz Pentium III has less RAM than your tablet but it seems to handle running Xubuntu 8.10 just fine. Try a live CD to see if it is any more responsive. Using Gutsy you might be hitting issues with things that were never patched, and the like.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:36 AM on December 24, 2008

According to this your tablet is maxed out at 512 MB RAM.

Turn off any services you aren't using, there are plenty of threads out there on streamlining Ubuntu.
I would upgrade to get the latest bugfixes that haven't been passed down to 7.10 and I can second trying out the latest Xubuntu live cd.
posted by tresbizzare at 8:09 AM on December 24, 2008

Upon further review the page I referenced is for the tc1000, your tablet has 2 memory slots that each support up 1024MB pc133 sodimms. One is easily accessible for consumer upgrade and the other (according to HP) can only be accessed by them or an authorized service provider.

The factory configurations listed here indicate that your model has 512MB in the hard to access slot. You could easily add a 1024MB sodimm and triple your memory.
posted by tresbizzare at 8:29 AM on December 24, 2008

If it worked fine for a while, I doubt that it is RAM, unless your usage has changed. I'd look at overheating. There should be some sort of sensor package that you can install that will show you CPU temps. There should also be a way to find the actual operating speed of CPU as the power/thermal management ramps it up or down.
posted by Good Brain at 10:33 AM on December 24, 2008

I haven't seen anybody say it, so: running 'free -m' while it's hung up will tell you if it's low ram. Check the '-/+ buffers' line, 'free' column.

Which brings me to a second point -- if you don't have enough ram, you need to have a good amount of swap space. By default, Ubuntu creates an appropriate swap partition (should be at least 1GB for you), but you may have done something to it. But you don't need a dedicated swap partition, a regular file is just as good. Instructions here.
posted by mad bomber what bombs at midnight at 11:05 AM on December 24, 2008

Normally 512mb ram isn't enough for that kind of usage in ubuntu. Firefox and gimp especially.

That said, if it was working fine until recently then as Good Brain said, something might have changed. In this case I'd check the hard drive too - if it's starting to fail the computer will take forever to load apps and generally hang/become slow yet the cpu usage will remain low.
posted by rmathew1 at 11:09 AM on December 24, 2008