Linux Mint seems bloated?

[dexl]

Hello,
I'm a loooong time user of LM, and a fan too boot, I have a question regarding Linux Mint's performance.

I find that LM 20.2 Mate that is installed on my system seems so slow in comparison to previous versions. Upon boot without opening any applications the System Monitor shows 1.8GB (out of 15.6GB) memory in use. Is this normal?

I'm asking because my computer is not that old:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor x 12
but it seems slower than my old computer. It takes a long time to boot into the desktop, otherwise the system is responsive but it kinda feels bloated.

I looked at other distros with Mate, namely Debian Mate and upon boot without opening any applications the System Monitor shows a little over 500MB of memory. So my question is: is there something I am missing or is Linux Mint more resource hungry? Thank you all for your input.

[smurphos]

In a 20.3 VM (all three DE's installed).

Following a fresh boot for each test and left idle until the mintupdate icon showed mintupdate had loaded and refreshed...
Not much in it these days between the three DE's - back in 19.x days the differences were more pronounced. The ballpark was the same though - about half a gig of RAM in use for a freshly booted system.

Have you installed much software that autostarts itself....

Cinnamon

Code: Select all

steve@steve-VirtualBox:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          2,9Gi       586Mi       1,4Gi        11Mi       955Mi       2,2Gi
Swap:         735Mi          0B       735Mi

MATE

Code: Select all

steve@steve-VirtualBox:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          2,9Gi       550Mi       1,4Gi        20Mi       965Mi       2,2Gi
Swap:         735Mi          0B       735Mi

XFCE

Code: Select all

steve@steve-VirtualBox:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          2,9Gi       497Mi       1,5Gi       2,0Mi       920Mi       2,3Gi
Swap:         735Mi          0B       735Mi

[dexl]

Wow, thank you for your input and the 3 output tests. Yes, I suppose I will need to look into what is on autostart, I know I have Dropbox, blue light filter, and I think that's it. I was thinking that maybe the fact that I have LM installed on a HDD rather than an SSD might slow things down a little?

[absque fenestris]

I can also add my two cents:

Mint 20.2 MATE right after startup (VirtualBox) - Mint 19.3 MATE is practically identical

Code: Select all

ms@ms-vb:~$ free -h
		total        used        free      shared       buff/cache   available
Mem:          	3.8Gi       472Mi	2.5Gi        16Mi         911Mi           3.1Gi
Swap:         	1.8Gi          0B	1.8Gi

Mint 20.3 Cinnamon (Virtualbox, simply all windows effects activated ...)

Code: Select all

m@m:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          4.8Gi       769Mi       3.0Gi       101Mi       1.0Gi       3.7Gi
Swap:         2.0Gi          0B       2.0Gi

Mint LMDE 4 Cinnamon (Virtualbox, simply all windows effects activated ...)

Code: Select all

m@m:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          3.9Gi       825Mi       2.1Gi        56Mi       981Mi       2.8Gi
Swap:         4.0Gi          0B       4.0Gi

Mint 20.2 Cinnamon (Virtualbox, simply all windows effects activated ...)

Code: Select all

m@m:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          3.8Gi       700Mi       2.2Gi        25Mi       1.0Gi       2.9Gi
Swap:         2.0Gi          0B       2.0Gi

Mint 20.0 Cinnamon, full installation on external SSD (with several applets and desklets running - and all window gimmicks activated)

Code: Select all

ms@ms:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          7.5Gi       921Mi       5.3Gi       252Mi       1.4Gi       6.1Gi
Swap:         2.0Gi          0B       2.0Gi

[MikeNovember]

I was thinking that maybe the fact that I have LM installed on a HDD rather than an SSD might slow things down a little?

Hi,

Not "slow things down a little" but "hugely slow down things".

Replacing an HDD by an SSD is the 1st thing to do to increase speed (it will decrease files access time, read time, write time).

Regards,

MN

[diabolicbg]

I was thinking that maybe the fact that I have LM installed on a HDD rather than an SSD might slow things down a little?

Hi,

Not "slow things down a little" but "hugely slow down things".

Replacing an HDD by an SSD is the 1st thing to do to increase speed (it will decrease files access time, read time, write time).

Regards,

MN

This is an indisputable fact. In order to verify my suspicions of a problem in the SSD, I cloned my system to a hard drive. On first power up after cloning, I thought the cloning had failed because the boot took about 4-5 minutes. The second time it booted faster, but compared to the SSD was several times slower as working at all. However, this is subjective - I haven't detected the times on both media.

[dexl]

Thank you all for your input and spot on replies!