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I have a FS Amilo laptop with 2GB of RAM. I have Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Puppy Linux installed on it. I chose Lubuntu for speed, but my experience isn't as smooth as I expected.

The desktop environment is a bit faster in Lubuntu, but using Chrome or Firefox seems to be in fact slower in Lubuntu than in Kubuntu, which is very puzzling. I have also tried to run Chrome (and Firefox) via an Openbox login, to absolutely minimize other RAM demands, but there isn't any difference (with 2GB of RAM, I wouldn't expect any such issues anyway).

Is there anything I could check to exclude any fixable issues, such as some RAM settings or other? I should note that browser activity is sluggish even in simple pages (e.g. Facebook), I'm not talking about watching HD videos on youtube or something.

I suspect the lack of a graphics card is partially responsible (alas, the curse of laptops), but I wouldn't expect this to be such a visible issue. And the perception that Kubuntu seems a bit faster than Lubuntu when the browser is running makes me suspicious.

  • have you looked at your swap settings and swap usage? From http://askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness you can check your "swappiness" with the command cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and set it by editing the file /etc/sysctl.confand changing the linevm.swappiness = 60and rebooting. The number is on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 meaning the computer won't use the hard disk until the RAM is completely used up. Less HD usage usually means faster performance. Also, you can reduce/disable disk caching in Firefox and Chrome. The commandfree -m` will show swap usage – Jeffrey Lam Dec 30 '15 at 17:48
  • At some point I did suspect the swap file and disabled it altogether - without any visible difference in performance, either for the better or for the worse. But I'll give this a shot too, thanks. –  Dec 30 '15 at 18:15
  • How about reducing disk caching in Chrome/disabling disk caching in Firefox? That wouldn't explain the difference between Lubuntu and Kubuntu, but it might speed things up a little bit. – Jeffrey Lam Dec 30 '15 at 18:36
  • I tried both suggestions and didn't see any difference. Interestingly, however, although the cat command returns a value of 60, searching the /etc/sysctl.conf file proved fruitless - i.e. there was no vm.swappiness = 60 line in it. Peculiar... Thanks for the effort, in any case. –  Dec 31 '15 at 06:44
  • Not sure if you know about the command top, which lets you monitor both cpu and memory (RSS) usage. I don't know if it is worth checking that the appropriate video driver is being used, and that hardware acceleration (if present) is enabled. That's all I have for ideas now. Hope you work it out – Jeffrey Lam Dec 31 '15 at 10:57

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I'm no high fi technical person, but I believe I understand your concern.. I'll try to explain with a different viewpoint.

Lubuntu is customized to work on a low cpu speed and RAM, when you use system with 2GB or more RAM and multicore CPU's most of the resources are not in use while running Lubuntu, but Kubuntu or Ubuntu uses all the resources of a high end newer computers.

Have you ever tried to run a Ubuntu 12.10 or higher on Dual Core CPU and 1GB RAM? I did!... and the OS was getting hanged while moving the cursor .. yupp.

Anyway, do one thing... (I have not tried it yet, but going to soon..) install Virtual Box and try running two or three Lubuntus inside your Lubuntu OS and do the same thing in Kubuntu. Let me know what you experienced .

Looking forward to your response

:-)

Humayun Al Rasheid
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