How to make Ubuntu 14.04 run with less lag?

Question

I recently updated from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS and for the first time it worked!

However, whenever I move my mouse over an application icon on the unity shell, the animation takes forever to show me what the name of the application is ( A.k.a the tooltip ). The same happens with menus and sub-menus.

Other than that, it is overall in general, slow. I just want to know if there are any tips to fix this or make my system faster.

This is what it says when I type in glxinfo | grep renderer:

GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer, 
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.4, 128 bits)

Output of lspci | grep VGA:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

The basic description sounds like you are not using hardware OpenGL. — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 15:28
That's really a judgement call for you. I had a similar issue on an HP laptop and eventually solved it be getting appropriate graphics drivers. — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 15:31
Can you append the output of glxinfo | grep renderer to your question? You may need to sudo apt-get install mesa-utils first — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 15:40
the output of the glxinfo | grep renderer should only be a few lines - you are looking to not see something that says 'llvmpipe' — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 15:50
OK - you are not running OpenGL from your graphics card. You will need to determine what card you have, and go from there for your options. Can you add the output of lspci | grep VGA — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 15:52
ps the | grep VGA sifts the output of lspci so that we only see lines of interest for this subject — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 15:52
I'll type up a longish answer. Several options to try, and the one I use is at the top. — Charles Green, Aug 23 '14 at 16:02

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Your system is not currently using hardware acceleration for graphics - to enable this, you will need to try to update the drivers. I know of four options, only one of which has ever worked well for me.

Before you use any of these options, you may also want to run sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree - this will load the firmware for which there is no source code.

Option 1 (the only one that worked for me) Use the graphics drivers from oibaf:

sudo add-apt-repositoryppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

More information can be found at launchpad

Option 2 - use the xorg-edgers. These can be found on launchpad, but they are not always entirely stable and may break your system

Option 3 - download and compile the official slick new and totally advanced intel drivers from 01.org. Before you do this, read about how to uninstall them!

Option 4 - in the software sources (open the dash and type software sources), the rightmost tab 'Additional Drivers' may have drivers that can work in your system. Again, you should review how to remove them, before you install them.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 23 '14 at 15:30

I don't have enough rep to comment, but what's the output of swapon -s? If your not running a certain amount of swap space, your not doing your memory any favours.

To make this more of an answer than a comment, I suggest also trying to remove as much of the extraneous bloatware that comes with ubuntu as possible. It's up to you to decide what you do and don't need, but go exploring. Run top -c and see which programs and services are using a lot of CPU, and if you don't need them running, kill the process. If you don't need them at all, purge them.

Another good place to look for stuff that uses resources is in the services. sudo service --status-all will give you a list of running services. I'm not going to assume that you aren't running a production server, but if you don't need apache2, sudo service apache2 stop, if you don't need mysql, cups, dictd, etc.. turn it off. It may not give you the jump your looking for, but every little bit counts.

If it says nothing, https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-12-04 is friendliest guide I've found on increasing the swap space, though he doesn't cover in depth the ratio you should employ to determine the size of the swap based on the amount of memory in your system. — blanket_cat, Aug 23 '14 at 15:41

How to make Ubuntu 14.04 run with less lag?

2 Answers2