Arch Linux

Axell

Member

Registered: 2009-01-11

Posts: 43

Performance issues - how to find the reason?

Hello.
I'm not sure if I can give all the required information in the first post here because the problem is a bit abstract... But I will try
So the problem is - I'm having serious Linux desktop performance issues on my new (used) laptop. Most of the small GUI utilities work well, or I at least cannot see any problems, but some more or less heavy applications like Firefox or IDEs lag a lot. For example, opening new empty tab or closing a tab in Firefox takes about 5-10 seconds, loading very basic pages like google front page may take 10-40 seconds, no matter if it was cached and loaded 5 minutes ago. Complete Firefox UI has hardcore lags. Even on my previous mid-level laptop from 2010 it all ran fluently.

I've tried to create a fresh user account to exclude possible desktop configuration issues. Didn't help. I've tried to run Firefox on Ubuntu live CD and it was also very laggy, which should mean it's not because of probably slow HDD and exclude problems specific to Arch Linux. I've also tested how Firefox runs in Windows on this laptop and it was fast as hell, so I believe it's not a hardware issue.

CPU, RAM and HDD usage stays very very low even when Firefox "works hard" on opening tabs.

Are there any tools to help me to find out what is the reason of performance issues on Linux? Any way to profile it?

Laptop is Dell Latitude something.
Some details:
Latest kernel and software. Xfce desktop.
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz
RAM: 8Gb
GPU: Nvidia NVS 4200M (tried both open source and proprietary drivers)

Thanks.

Last edited by Axell (2016-09-27 21:40:21)

Axell

Member

Registered: 2009-01-11

Posts: 43

Re: Performance issues - how to find the reason?

Okay I figured it out by disabling/enabling various features in BIOS. The problem was with the Intel SpeedStep feature turned on and(!) damaged AC adapter alert feature turned off(!) and damaged AC adapter.

More information about SpeedStep here, if someone will read it: http://askubuntu.com/questions/590529/u … n-full-spe