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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](http://askubuntu.com/q/103915/178596)) 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