Arch Linux

Jean Rabelo

Member

Registered: 2022-06-24

Posts: 4

[SOLVED]The system is slow and it doesn't use my resources

I have 24GB of RAM (all of it detected in htop and neofetch) and I'm struggling to make the system use it, even with firefox and multiple tabs open.

This happens with both awesome as window manager and xfce4 as desktop environment (I've tested them separately).

Some specifications are the following (this is the output of neofetch when I use it on Awesome and have firefox running (really slow) with 2 tabs open on youtube):

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Host: Aspire VX5-591G V1.08
Kernel: 5.18.5-arch1-1
Packages: 519 (pacman)
Shell: bash 5.1.16
Resolution: 1920x1080, 1366x768
WM: awesome
Theme: Adwaita [GTK3]
Icons: Adwaita [GTK3]
Terminal: terminator
CPU: Intel i5-7300HQ (4) @ 3.500GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 630
Memory: 1605MiB / 23909MiB

(HTOP shows 1.026GB of RAM being consumed, so, even less than the 1.6GB shown by neofetch)
(HTOP also shows low usage of CPU, 10% or less of one of the 4 cores)

The situation is the same with xfce4.

I'm running arch from an flashdrive (portable linux). It's a 128GB DataTraveler Exodia Kingston. It uses the USB3.0 port in my laptop. I've chosen this one because it seems to be reasonably fast to read/write (although I don't know if it's good enough to run arch with window manager smooth).

All material I see on the matter deal with archlinux using too much of the resources. The only other I saw with a similar problem to mine was this one, but his problem disappeared without him doing nothing in particular (even he doesn't know why).

Just as a comparison, in Windows (my main system for now, I bought this usb flaskdrive to test arch out), my memory usage goes up way faster, making it much more responsive.

I hope I've given some detailed info on the matter. I'm looking forward to your input and I'm ready to give even more information that you consider to be relevant.

Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated!

Last edited by Jean Rabelo (2022-06-24 21:00:57)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 51,826

Re: [SOLVED]The system is slow and it doesn't use my resources

This is not a situation of "help! my linux uses too little RAM" but "you're running from a flash drive, what do you expect"?

nb. that a flash drive is NOT a cheap, compact SSD and not really suited to run an OS, because there's absolutely no wear leveling - it will die fast because of a few sectors being worn out.

As for firefox, you want to move its caches etc. into a tmpfs mount, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM
This will consume more RAM and speed up things vastly (nb. the caveats in that wiki!)

Also mount the flash drive w/ "relatime,lazytime" options to avoid those writes and you might also be interested in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Overlay_filesystem and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … isk_access

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Jean Rabelo

Member

Registered: 2022-06-24

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED]The system is slow and it doesn't use my resources

That's a great deal of information right there.

Thank you.

I'll mark this post as solved.

Jean Rabelo

Member

Registered: 2022-06-24

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED]The system is slow and it doesn't use my resources

Thanks Seth. I've switched to an SSD and the system is much much faster. It must have been the flashdrive indeed.