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My Ubuntu system has been slow since recent updates. Usable for some things, but Facebook in particular has slowed to a crawl. A facebook video takes 5 to 8 minutes to load. The Gnome system monitor shows I have a swap file but the current value never varies away from zero. Running a Samsung netbook N110 with 2Gig ram.

alisdair810
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  • Does it sit there with a smoothly animated loading symbol or is it really choppy? The former indicates internet issues, the latter is RAM/CPU. Apps taking a very long time to even show up is HDD. – TheWanderer Sep 04 '16 at 19:50
  • @zacharee1 machine behaves perfectly till I get to sites with heavy load. From your comment it looks like the HDD. – alisdair810 Sep 04 '16 at 21:11
  • Do you use Firefox? It can become very slow if it's not restarted from time to time. Reducing the use of Flash can also be very important. – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Sep 05 '16 at 06:26

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A system with only 2GB RAM should definitely have a swap partition or file!

Swap is used if your RAM is not large enough to fulfil the memory demands of your system and running applications. It's located on your HDD and therefore magnitudes slower than RAM, but without it, if your RAM is 100% used up, the system starts killing processes to free up some. Otherwise it may swap out memory pages to the swap area on disk.

You can verify whether you have any swap enabled already by running the command swapon which will list them all (or nothing, if nothing is set up).

I would recommend you to configure about 2GB - 4GB swap space for your setup.

To add a swap partition, check out How do I add a swap partition after system installation?.

If you want a swap file instead, read Adding a new swap file. How to edit fstab to enable swap after reboot?.

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Byte Commander
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  • swapon = on, swap drive sda5 = 2gb, but gnome shows no activity. Gparted confirms partition and swap is good and on. – alisdair810 Sep 04 '16 at 21:14
  • What do you mean by "gnome shows no activity"? Looks like you have a working and enabled swap of 2GB though, that's alright. – Byte Commander Sep 04 '16 at 21:26
  • What I thought, but as soon as I hit a site heavy with adverts or video content everything slows to a crawl and the usage figure remains at 0%. (internet running healthy, put HDD and memory into backup machine, same spec, and same issue.) – alisdair810 Sep 04 '16 at 21:49
  • Probably that means your RAM is filling up to the point where swap starts to get used - which is magnitudes slower than RAM. You can confirm this by looking at (or showing it to me) the output of free -h once your machine gets slow. – Byte Commander Sep 04 '16 at 21:52
  • Resolved. @Zacharee1 was correct, HDD had slowed to 4.5 meg/sec. New HDD and version 16 and up, running and I'm still learning. – alisdair810 Sep 09 '16 at 13:12