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I'm using Kubuntu with KDE Plasma 5.3 (Just installed the system a few days ago)

Something strange is happening..The system is very, and I mean VERY laggy.

When I'm doing simple tasks like leaving chrome opened and watching something on VLC and Ktorrent is downloading in the background.

My specs:

Intel Core2Duo E7500 2.93GHZ

AMD 5570 1GB DDR3

2x 2GB Kingstone RAM

And here's a screenshot from the system monitor. Screenshot

The strange thing here is that the system resources aren't all used up.

Sam
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1 Answers1

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You have a laggy system because you have a lot of swap being used. You have around 512 MB Swap Being Used. You seem to have a Standard Spinning Hard Disk which means swapping will cause your System to Go Crazy Slow.

I had the same issue with my laptop I did the below.

1) Reduce the Swappiness to 10. Use this Wiki

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

2) Get rid of Swap completely. Remove the Fstab entry for SWAP.

sudo nano /etc/fstab Remove the Entry for your swap partition.

3) sudo apt-get install zram-config

Now my system swaps to RAM instead of slow Hard Disk Drive which is causing slowness.

To establish this please do the below.

1) sudo swapoff -a

See if system responsiveness Improves. If yes then your problem is swap and you may follow my answer to fix this.

Since I have experienced this first hand, I can confidently say it will work for you.

Rajat Pandita
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  • Thanks for your answer.

    I did all the instructions..I'll test the system for some time and report back to you.

     – Sam May 19 '15 at 13:14
  • Swap likely is the problem, but removing will just cause problems when the computer runs out of memory (surprisingly easy with 4GB). Changing the swapiness (also detailed here) should be enough, you should not need to disable it. – Wilf May 19 '15 at 15:21
  • I think it worked! The system is a bit faster now..and no lag 'till the moment. – Sam May 19 '15 at 16:19
  • I have always been a firm believer of the thought that SWAP is useful for Server Use. A Linux Server is technically Headless hence SWAP does not degrade a user's experience. However in case of a Desktop the User Interface Elements tend to Slow down/Freeze when Swap is used. if your SWAP Partition is on an SSD you will never feel the difference. If the SWAP is on a standard Hard Disk Drive, The Whole Desktop starts to freeze! I am using the same Solution that I provided to you. Exactly Same issue on my Laptop. – Rajat Pandita May 19 '15 at 17:11