[ale] ubuntu 12.04 SLOW!

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

OK. 11.04 is exhibiting molasses behavior too. Maybe I'm abusing the computer too much, but I'm confused. If you guys can tell me what's happening, please let me know. Regardless of the cause, I like Gnome 2 and configurable panels the best, hence 11.04.

I'm trying to create a "clean" computer that border agents can inspect, should they choose, while I'm on the road. There will be nothing there to see but a plain vanilla install of Ubuntu.

Here's what I did. Install the OS and all patches, which is now 11.04.

Install the secure-delete program with synaptic. Use to fill up empty space and swap space to permanently delete deleted files.

Turn off swap: sudo swapoff -a
Fill the swap space with zeros: sudo sswap -l -v /dev/sda5 (let this run)
Start filling the normal drive with zeros: sudo sfill -l -v / (let this run)

These processes are incredibly slow, on the order of .5 MB / sec. So, I start creating junk files of my own to fill up the drive quicker.

dd if=/dev/zero of=./junk-16G bs=1G count=16

This last item will create a 16GB file at about 25 MB / sec in my case.

Note that, at this point, cpu utilization is UNDER 5 %. At the moment, there are still hundreds of GB of free HDD space.

While all this is going on, I start Firefox and try to do some browsing, like playing youtube, etc. Firefox is so incredibly slow as to be almost unusable. It may take 5-10 seconds just to paint the screen. At other times, it works more smoothly. I'm totally baffled as to the reason. Filling up the hard drive will take a long time, so I want to multitask with the PC in the mean time. I don't know what's up. The lack of a swap area shouldn't be a problem as I have 8 GB of RAM.

Also, when I use system monitor, and look at the file systems. It has a "free space" column and an "available space column". There are as much as about 15 GB of difference between them. Apparently, I can only fill up the available space with dd. But, sfill keeps going and fills up the free space, much slower. What does that mean.

Any help is always appreciated.

Sincerely,

Ron



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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com


Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

Gee. Fedora uses Gnome3 and it does work (just tablet mentality).

On 07/15/2012 02:02 PM, mike at trausch.us wrote:

On 07/15/2012 01:59 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote: 

However, I'm in a hurry to get this machine running. I deleted Ubuntu 12.04 and went back to 11.04 with Gnome 2 that I know and (usually) love. 

It only takes about 30 minutes after adding the PPA to get GNOME 3 on there and reboot. I am actually considering moving to Ubuntu on my desktop because the Gentoo people aren't stabilizing GNOME 3 quickly enough (3.4 is out now, damnit!) and there is little care in keeping the unstable GNOME 3 tree updatable even if done daily. 	--- Mike 

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