Laggy 10.04 (Was: Re: ssh logins on 10.04)

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Tuesday 07 September 2010, gene heskett wrote:
> This 10.04 system TBT, is awful laggy, even from its own keyboard.
>  I think the next item to install is htop & figure out whats
> hogging the cpu. 6.06 never suffered from this.  Humm, htop shows
> nothing.  The lags is as if the multi-tasking context switch is 2
> seconds or so.  And htop says nothing is hogging the system, but
> it is 12 megs into swap sitting overnight.  6.06 was never into
> swap.

Apart from the obvious (getting a list of running processes and 
looking for anything superfluous): is kdm running?

Also, you should note that since 10.04 uses upstart, you're going to 
have to edit the files in /etc/init (no, not /etc/init.d) by hand to 
stop the services from starting every boot. Just to make things more 
fun, there are still quite a few apps that use the old Sys-V init 
style.

You might also want to check whether /tmp is on the disk or using 
some RAM fs. Having it in RAM works quite well for desktop machines 
that only run a day or so. On a server, it will tend to fill up force 
the use of swap.

BTW, if you find any apps that turn out to be major resource hogs, 
feel free to post them here, as I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one 
glad for a little pointer (I'll likely do my first proper install 
since 8.04 in a few months and would be glad for a list of things to 
watch out for).

  --Reinhold