Ubuntu extremely slow on high end PC

Question

So I finally got to installing ubuntu on my PC at home.

Installation went fine, smooth and all. When I finally rebooted into the OS everything was terribly slow. I started by installing the latest NVidia drivers and using the processor microcode firmware setting. Rebooted again but that didn't do anything either. Opening the file manager for example takes about 3-4 seconds. Is there a driver I am still missing? Could it have to do something with it being a M2 SSD?

Performance on Windows is unfortunately fine.

Using Ubuntu 15.10

PC information:

• I7-5820k
• GTX980TI
• 16GB DDR4 Ram
• 512GB Samsung 950 Evo

Output of inxi-G:

Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GM200 [GeForce GTX 980 Ti]
       Display Server: X.Org 1.17.2 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau)
       Resolution: 1680x1050@59.95hz, 1920x1080@60.00hz
       GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 980 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
       GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 352.63

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
powersave

$ sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq
437636

The output of cpupower frequency-info. I've changed the governor to perfomance now :).

    analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms.
  hardware limits: 1.20 GHz - 3.80 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.20 GHz and 3.80 GHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 434 MHz.
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes

Answer 1

An alternate answer which may be more appropriate for new installations of Ubuntu is to use the cpupower commands which control the intel_pstate governor system.

The command cpupower frequency-info will indicate on the first line, if intel_pstate is the diver being used, and in the current_policy seciton will indicate either 'powersave' or 'performance'

To change the policy issue the command

sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

This does not persist over reboot (for my laptop) but could be placed into /etc/rc.local or a similar initialization method.

On a side note: I also used the ondemand governor in prior releases of Ubuntu: if desired, intel_pstate can be disabled by use of the kernel variable "intel_pstate=disable"

Answer 2

Your CPU speed is very, very slow. On my system, with a Core2 Quad which is more than 6 years old, I get:

$ sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq
2394000

Yours is a far faster processor and yet is running orders of magnitude slower. The problem seems to be your CPU governor. This controls how the CPU behaves. Your options are:

• Performance keeps the CPU at the highest possible frequency
• Powersave keeps the CPU at the lowest possible frequency
• Userspace exports the available frequency information to the user level (through the /sys file system) and permits user-space control of the CPU frequency
• Ondemand scales the CPU frequencies according to the CPU usage (like does the userspace frequency scaling daemons, but in kernel)
• Conservative acts like the ondemand but increases frequency step by step

You have it set to powersave so it's throttling the CPU in an effort to consume as little power as possible. Setting it to pretty much anything else will improve your performance. I recommend you use ondemand which gives the most flexible option, high speed when needed and low when not so as to not waste energy.

Run this command to change the governor to ondemand:

echo "ondemand" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

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NOTE @CharlesGreen points out in the comments that you might only have powersave and performance available. He also provided a link to a similar question, so if this approach doesn't work, I suggest you read the solution offered there.