Linux Mint Forums

Generally I've noticed that both Unity on Ubuntu and Cinnamon on Mint seem to have "slowness" issues on my computer.. Asus X83Vb 2.0GHz dual intel with nVidia card and 4GB RAM. On a fresh startup it's not so apparent.. but as time moves on... things get slow. And I mean opening Nautilus.. then opening VLC or Movie Player.. Responsiveness seems slow.. like there is a delay or something. I'm assuming that as Chrome lives on and continues piling more and more RAM (literally some webpages will just accumulate RAM space over time) that it is probably causing the problem.. But even so... if I decide to do something system-extensive such as play a game such as Team Fortress 2.... lol... or even just start up a virtual machine.. it feels like things are unnecessarily slow. I've had this computer long enough to know what it can and cannot handle.. VERY experienced with that... (Half life 2 series.. including Black Mesa.. on Windows of course) Some of the things just seem downright pathetic. And that is where I assume it's Cinnamon consuming a level of resources I've never imagined an OS was capable of doing... probably akin to Windows 7... or something.. since I have a major lack of experience with Windows 7.. but Windows 7 I BELIEVE still allows you to trim off the graphical aspects.. of course.. Cinnamon doesn't exactly appear to be THAT graphically intensive.. as beautiful as it is.
What I want to blame is the nature of Cinnamon.. yes it's a beautiful modification.. but in essence.. it is Gnome 3.
Could this be my problem? If so I would like to know if it's a smart thing to switch to Linux Mint Debian or Mint the Gnome 2 Mint.. pure Debian version seems experimental and that concerns me for stability.. and Gnome 2.. well.. the modifications to Gnome 2.. I forget what it's called.. I'm worried that it's not going to be supported as long as..... they say..................... and would I need to re-install Mint to switch?

Just install the mate or xfce desktops in your current install. My experience with anything built on top of gnome 3 is it does tend to slow down and cinnamon is still under heavy development so there could still be problems.
I just use the software manager and do a search for them and install what it recommends. Log out after dl the one you want to try and where you enter your username and password at the bottom you'll see a place to change what desktop want to use.

is that stable? I heard back things about switching desktop interfaces... or is this fixed?

I have the following hardware

Memory 4GiB
CPU Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q8300 @ 2.50GHz × 4
GPU GeForce GT 220/PCIe/SSE2

and Cinnamon 1.6.7 feels very fast and lightweight, even in terms of needed memory (177 MiB at the moment). Don 't know if it's the CPU that makes the difference 'cause it's not that recent, surely the GPU is nothing earth shattering. I had XFCE installed on my oldish laptop but it didn't feel really faster, so I reinstalled Cinnamon there too: even with the open source driver (ATI Mobility card) it feels decently fast.

I tend to disable all services I don't need (f.i. Bluetooth, Samba etc.) at boot, and enable them when/if necessary, that might save some CPU and especially memory.

Rehdon

mbman88 wrote:Generally I've noticed that both Unity on Ubuntu and Cinnamon on Mint seem to have "slowness" issues on my computer.. Asus X83Vb 2.0GHz dual intel with nVidia card and 4GB RAM. On a fresh startup it's not so apparent.. but as time moves on... things get slow. And I mean opening Nautilus.. then opening VLC or Movie Player.. Responsiveness seems slow.. like there is a delay or something. I'm assuming that as Chrome lives on and continues piling more and more RAM (literally some webpages will just accumulate RAM space over time) that it is probably causing the problem..

If you were to start with a fresh boot (clean memory) and do not open Chrome at all (assuming you have another browser to use), do you find the same slowness? It has been my experience (different distro and DE) that long/extended Chromium/Chrome use would make everything else slow.

Pat

Rehdon wrote:I have the following hardware

Memory 4GiB
CPU Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q8300 @ 2.50GHz × 4
GPU GeForce GT 220/PCIe/SSE2

and Cinnamon 1.6.7 feels very fast and lightweight, even in terms of needed memory (177 MiB at the moment). Don 't know if it's the CPU that makes the difference 'cause it's not that recent, surely the GPU is nothing earth shattering. I had XFCE installed on my oldish laptop but it didn't feel really faster, so I reinstalled Cinnamon there too: even with the open source driver (ATI Mobility card) it feels decently fast.

I tend to disable all services I don't need (f.i. Bluetooth, Samba etc.) at boot, and enable them when/if necessary, that might save some CPU and especially memory.

Rehdon

Now I have to say... GTA4 plays DECENTLY on a quad-processor system while on my dual-core system it barely handles 640x480 forces resolution (on Windows, of course). I would conclude that quad-processors do make a difference. But I am starting to get the picture..

palo wrote:

mbman88 wrote:Generally I've noticed that both Unity on Ubuntu and Cinnamon on Mint seem to have "slowness" issues on my computer.. Asus X83Vb 2.0GHz dual intel with nVidia card and 4GB RAM. On a fresh startup it's not so apparent.. but as time moves on... things get slow. And I mean opening Nautilus.. then opening VLC or Movie Player.. Responsiveness seems slow.. like there is a delay or something. I'm assuming that as Chrome lives on and continues piling more and more RAM (literally some webpages will just accumulate RAM space over time) that it is probably causing the problem..

If you were to start with a fresh boot (clean memory) and do not open Chrome at all (assuming you have another browser to use), do you find the same slowness? It has been my experience (different distro and DE) that long/extended Chromium/Chrome use would make everything else slow.

Pat

I haven't tried it... but I'm going to keep that in mind whenever I want to start up some hefty warez.. such as Steam for Linux. It's not a big deal since playing games is kind of a "session".. But even-so.. is there a way to have "clean memory" without restarting (such as logging out)?

I bet it's Chrome but that's just me. For android it's ok but it's a real hog on computers.

I have Cinnamon on a amd x2 4200+ with only 2gb of ram and i'm only using little above 400 memory.

I am going to say one last thing, I think. I've used Chrome just as heavily on Gnome 2 while on Ubuntu.. and considering the slowdowns I'm getting I would have to say it is a problem that is outside of Chrome... I do acknowledge Chrome's obesity, however... this just seems to be a system that doesn't handle it well. I don't think Unity was handling it well either.

mbman88 wrote:is there a way to have "clean memory" without restarting (such as logging out)?

Logging out [of the gnome- or cinnamon-session] will free those resources.

This might be worth a try: launch steam directly from the display manager (login screen) -- http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 97#p665493

I already have that.. apparently.. But I didn't know it.. Thanks for showing me that steam login. I will definitely use that from now on.