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Dear fellow Ubuntu users, for two years now I've been using Ubuntu. Although I love the system, it's quality is going downhill, steeply. Every new update (12.10, 13.04, 13.10) the issues only seem to get worse. Now my system laggs every other minute (freezes for a couple of seconds) and is unresponsive at times. Firefox, for example, seems to crash every 10 minutes (but only for a few seconds where a grey zone overlays the whole browser window).

I figured my issues could be due to Unity failing as I found many people on the internet with the same conclusion so I exchanged Unity for Gnome only to discover that it didn't fix anything (it actually added to the problem).

A second guess would have been a malfunctioning or slow HDD, running a benchmark yielded following results:

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:     2 MB in  6.42 seconds = 319.19 kB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   2 MB in  4.38 seconds = 467.79 kB/sec

Which is extremely strange since I wouldn't expect cashed reading to be slower than buffered reading.

So having said this, can anyone tell met whether I should be on the lookout for a new HDD or whether my OS is in fact failing?

Working for school has been extremely annoying with a laggy system like this and I desperately need a fix here. What I have tried/done:

  • HDD benchmark
  • installing GNOME rather than Unity
  • Reinstall every Ubuntu OS from 12.04 to 13.10,

Thanks in advance!

Braiam
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user93692
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  • What's your HDD? – user1714647 Dec 06 '13 at 21:27
  • Well I don't know much about computers when it comes to hardware, how can I find out which HDD I have without having to open my computer? Edit: this is not a duplicate BTW, I'm not looking for performance enhancement. Something is making my GUI lag and I can't figure out what it is... – user93692 Dec 07 '13 at 14:14
  • They can be cause by a lot of thing, "few seconds where a grey zone overlays the whole browser window", Did you check your graphic card (dual,driver)? If so, just ask another question here and someone here might help you. – Shaharil Ahmad Dec 08 '13 at 10:00

1 Answers1

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Are you sure it's not a memory issue? What does:

free -m

say when things are sluggish?

Joseph Santaniello
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