Linux slowness

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dishdude

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I have an odd issue here, Lenovo E460 with an i5-6200U, 4 GB RAM and a SSD.

Originally I loaded LM Mate 18.3 32-bit (already had it downloaded for an old 32-bit machine) and I was experiencing some odd screen tearing issues and a delay in Chrome where I'd click on something (like a thread on BITOG) and I'd have a 5 sec or so delay before it loaded.

I installed W10, and both issues went away.

Decided to try 18.3 Cinnamon 64-bit and the lag came back. Last night it caused me to create a double post.

Any suggestions? Chrome is my browser of choice and more important than OS.
 
Stab in the dark here, but do you have sufficient disk space, especially for your swap partition (and wherever Chrome is storing it's cache files)?

Can you configure Chrome to not use any cache, and see what happens?

With the basic specs of your machine, aside from perhaps you could use a little more RAM*, there should not be any lags.

Not a common problem, but some people have a lot of fonts. Large Font collections are often killers of performance.

* It's cheap, max it out if you go there.
 
I tried adding a second 4GB stick while MATE was installed and it didn't make a difference. The system doesn't appear to be stressed.

yOQpUwE.png
 
I tried adding a second 4GB stick while MATE was installed and it didn't make a difference. The system doesn't appear to be stressed.

yOQpUwE.png
 
Sounds like it may be a driver issue - video driver comes to mind 1st. Linux has less memory footprint than Win10 so it should run fine. Even starving it in a VM with 2 cores, 2GB of RAM and it will run better than that.

What's your load average while Chrome is running (top or w will give you the 1, 5, 15 minute average)?
How is the memory? (free -h)
Is something chewing up the disk usage (iotop)?

As a check, how does Firefox perform? I remember a while back that Chrome was not optimized under Linux.

Edit: your post must have been at the same time as mine. I'd be curious to your disk usage as well as how FF runs.
 
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Since you can change to 64 bit MATE without reinstalling, I'd try that first. I have low powered equipment and have found that's a bit snappier than Cinnamon. I have a real old timer that runs fine on Peppermint Linux--that's kind of a Xubuntu-Lubuntu kludge and is really light weight. Still planning on moving everything to Ubuntu MATE when 18.04.1 is released.

(Looks like you posted while I was writing--doesn't look like your system should be stressed at all. Back your data up and try a few more flavors-- It's all free)
 
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Just tried Firefox, it was doing the same. Now Chrome is working fine...go figure.
 
Try the Mint help board. There's some real expertise over there. Also check Chrome's help pages. Did things go bad after a Chrome update? Any misbehaving extensions?
 
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I'm wondering if you're overthinking this. Could it be a simple bandwidth issue on your network connection? Like maybe you're connected to a wireless network that's overloaded, or the upstream network is saturated, etc? Or it could be some other networking issue like a misconfigured MTU, or speed/duplex mismatch (if wired network).

Open a shell session and run "ifconfig". It should show you all your network interfaces along with all the statistics--stuff like "RX packets" and "TX packets". Look at anything including the word "errors". Here's the output from a desktop of mine:

enp0s25: flags=4163 mtu 1500
inet 192.168.1.42 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255
inet6 fe80::222:19ff:fe24:e97f prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20
ether 00:22:19:24:e9:7f txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 4368683 bytes 6099328616 (5.6 GiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 2229663 bytes 169301934 (161.4 MiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
device interrupt 21 memory 0xf7ae0000-f7b00000

I've bolded the lines showing where receive or transmit errors would show up--in your case they should show all zeros like above.

You're obviously doing fine in the cpu and mem/swap areas, so I'd look elsewhere. If the browser was a problem, I'd expect to see a spike in cpu while it was lagging, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
 
I don't think it's network since the main machine I'm on all day doesn't do it.

RX packets:121056 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:51949 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
 
I don't think it's network since the main machine I'm on all day doesn't do it.

RX packets:121056 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:51949 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
 
I’m with itguy08 on this one as far as the display drivers go.

When I first installed Mint a few years ago I was experiencing tearing and choppy playback with the proprietary Nvidia drivers. To remedy I switched over to Mints own Nouveau drivers and everything was fine.

Not sure if you’re running IGP or discrete but that’s a possible remedy.
 
The tearing is gone since I reinstalled but the lag is still there.
 
The tearing is gone since I reinstalled but the lag is still there.
 
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