Mint Mate 21.1 feels slow, even for a HDD. Tweaks?

[geekomatic]

Hi all,

Yeah, so installed Mate 21.1 to a 1TB HDD, 1st Gen i7 w/8GB RAM, dedicated AMD GPU card. Wasn't expecting a rocket, but it takes quite a while to useable desktop and hesitates on opening programs, across the board. I was pretty bummed.

Are there any quick tweaks I can employ to try to get a bit more oomph from this rig? Everything up to date.

PC is the HP dv6-6134tx

Thanks in advance!

[deck_luck]

Please read the READ: How To Get Help! item [5] Details! Details! Details! and post the system information output.

I did a quick web search for specs and that is old box with 5400RPM laptop hard drive. Slow is an understatement for the old laptop hard drives. The graphic card driver might be a problem if the driver did not load. Anyways, a good starting point is posting the system information.

[Pjotr]

Spend 20-30 dollars on a smallish SSD from a known brand, like Kingston or Sandisk. And replace the spinner by it. A world of difference.

Some safe speed tweaks:
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... -mint.html

[ThaCrip]

I 100% agree with Pjotr. unless it's totally out of the question, get a cheap SSD from a known manufacturer (I would avoid generic brands as a general rule) as you won't regret it. basically if you plan on using that computer moderately or more it makes no sense not to get a SSD given how cheap they are and it will basically cure any basic load speed issues. besides boot up and basic program load speed improvement, if you plan on loading more than one thing at a time occasionally, then the SSD's speed improvement becomes rather massive over a regular hard drive at this point. like say Wine is running and doing a decent amount of hard drive writes and you load up a browser or say you load up a browser while Mint is updating etc, things come down to a crawl on a regular hard drive vs a SSD.

hell, I bought a 'used' Kingston UV400 120GB for only $10 on Ebay not all that long ago (as I wanted to keep costs at a bare minimum) and put it into a backup laptop I have and moved the Intel 545s 128GB SSD in that to my backup desktop computer (my main desktop PC has a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD). so basically all three of my computers have a SSD now.

that used Kingston UV400 I bought has a official write life rating of 50TBW and when I bought it, it showed 15.6TBW ('sudo smartctl -x /dev/sdx' under 'Logical Sectors Written' you do "long number * 512 / 1024^4" = TBW) and 37.7TBR (TBR is not that important though) and had about 2 years and 8 months of power on hours. even the official Kingston SSD software's health indicator, which I temporarily had running on Win7, showed 81% (100% is new and it slowly declines from here). I don't expect that to fail anytime soon and at $10 I did not have much to lose as even if I get 3-5 years out of it (which I think ill get at least that), I more than got my money out of it. Kingston's A400 model has a 40TBW rating and does not have a DRAM cache like the UV400 does, but even with these flaws, it's still going to be much better than a HDD.

[motoryzen]

but it takes quite a while to useable desktop and hesitates on opening programs, across the board

again..details. HOW LONG..does it take to reach a usable desktop from the second you press the power button to power on that system? 45 seconds to 75 seconds? That is normal for a modern OS these days on spinning rust (* aka HDD).

This is 2023, not 2010. Even 500GB sata ssds are low cost enough. There is simply no excuse for running a modern day fully featured OS on a hdd.

I apologize for sounding possibly mean...but deck_luck made a valid comment. a 5400 rpm hdd even running windows xp sp3 would be noticeably slow by today's standards if web bloat wasn't the case as it is today or other OS system little files to load versus today's windows 10 and 11 and Linux Mint varieties, vanilla Ubuntu and Ubuntu Mate, and other pretty close-to-equally-weighted Linux distros.

But regardless....

See that pink section above that is virtually impossible to miss? Where it talks about how to get help That's a link...click it. step 5.

Or if you prefer the gui method

1. start button aka windows logo button on your keyboard. without quotes type system reports
2. click System information button upper left, copy button bottom right
3. Come back here, paste into the white area where you reply.

This will show us how Linux Mint deals with your hardware, but won't give any personally identifiable info

Also

paste the following command into the terminal individually and copy the results and paste them back here after clicking that </> button ( 5th from the left under Subject

systemd-analyze blame

[geekomatic]

Hello again,

I did paste the details in a document but then forgot to paste them here, apologies. The HDD is 7,200-- a replacement unit. I take in old PC's and peripherals, set them up, and donate to people I come across in need. I do the work for nothing, and as much as I wish I could buy new hardware for everyone, I can't afford it.

With regards for "tweaks" to help performance, in Windows the usual is to go into advanced system settings and choose, "best performance". That alone make everything pretty zippy. I also tend to turn off Windows Search service, as most people I ask never search within their own folders.

Those are the sorts of things I was asking about RE: Linux Mint Mate. I'm fortunate to at least have my i5, 4th gen desktop & 16GB RAM + SSD, so my experience is good. Just looking for a way to get the most I can from what I have to work with. I don't want to install Win 10 because it'll become EOL in 2025. Plus, I think Mint is a much better system. I've delivered quite a few to locals (pensioners) & they love it.

This system is taking 1:10 secs. to get to the login screen & then another 35 secs to get to a clickable start button. I started the timer after the HP BIOS screen. That seems long, even for a HDD.


Thanks for the "Speed up Your Mint" link.

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System:
  Kernel: 5.15.0-67-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.3.0 Desktop: MATE 1.26.0 wm: marco
    dm: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 21.1 Vera base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: Hewlett-Packard product: p6731a v: xxx0204GRxxxxxxxx0
    serial: <superuser required> Chassis: type: 3 serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: MSI model: 2A9C v: 1.1 serial: <superuser required> BIOS: American Megatrends v: 6.16
    date: 03/18/2011
CPU:
  Info: quad core model: Intel Core i7 870 bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Nehalem rev: 5 cache:
    L1: 256 KiB L2: 1024 KiB L3: 8 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 2896 high: 3414 min/max: 1200/2934 boost: enabled cores: 1: 3143 2: 3414
    3: 2295 4: 2983 5: 3045 6: 2999 7: 2648 8: 2645 bogomips: 46816
  Flags: ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 / R5 230 OEM] driver: radeon v: kernel pcie:
    speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 8 ports: active: DVI-I-1 empty: DP-1,DVI-D-1 bus-ID: 01:00.0
    chip-ID: 1002:6779
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.3 compositor: marco v: 1.26.0 driver: X:
    loaded: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa gpu: radeon display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1280x1024 s-dpi: 96
  Monitor-1: DVI-1 mapped: DVI-I-1 model: Dell 1707FP res: 1280x1024 dpi: 96 diag: 433mm (17")
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD CAICOS (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.15.0-67-generic LLVM 15.0.6) v: 3.3 Mesa 22.2.5
    compat-v: 3.1 direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel 5 Series/3400 Series High Definition Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard
    driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1b.0 chip-ID: 8086:3b56
  Device-2: AMD Caicos HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6450 / 7450/8450/8490 OEM R5 230/235/235X OEM]
    driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 8 bus-ID: 01:00.1
    chip-ID: 1002:aa98
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-67-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Hewlett-Packard
    driver: r8169 v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: d800 bus-ID: 02:00.0
    chip-ID: 10ec:8168
  IF: enp2s0 state: down mac: <filter>
  Device-2: Linksys AE1200 802.11bgn Wireless Adapter [Broadcom BCM43235] type: USB
    driver: brcmfmac bus-ID: 1-1.5:3 chip-ID: 13b1:0039
  IF: wlx94103e7b3eca state: up mac: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 931.51 GiB used: 16.73 GiB (1.8%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Hitachi model: HDT721010SLA360 size: 931.51 GiB speed: 3.0 Gb/s
    serial: <filter>
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 915.32 GiB used: 16.73 GiB (1.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 512 MiB used: 6.1 MiB (1.2%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/sda2
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 file: /swapfile
USB:
  Hub-1: 1-0:1 info: Full speed or root hub ports: 2 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s chip-ID: 1d6b:0002
  Hub-2: 1-1:2 info: Intel Integrated Rate Matching Hub ports: 6 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s
    chip-ID: 8087:0020
  Device-1: 1-1.5:3 info: Linksys AE1200 802.11bgn Wireless Adapter [Broadcom BCM43235]
    type: WiFi driver: brcmfmac rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s chip-ID: 13b1:0039
  Hub-3: 2-0:1 info: Full speed or root hub ports: 2 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s chip-ID: 1d6b:0002
  Hub-4: 2-1:2 info: Intel Integrated Rate Matching Hub ports: 8 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s
    chip-ID: 8087:0020
  Device-1: 2-1.5:3 info: Logitech Keyboard K120 type: Keyboard,HID driver: hid-generic,usbhid
    rev: 1.1 speed: 1.5 Mb/s chip-ID: 046d:c31c
  Device-2: 2-1.6:4 info: Dell Optical Wheel Mouse type: Mouse driver: hid-generic,usbhid
    rev: 2.0 speed: 1.5 Mb/s chip-ID: 413c:3012
  Device-3: 2-1.7:5 info: Fitipower Integrated Mass Storage Device type: Mass Storage
    driver: usb-storage rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s chip-ID: 18e3:9106
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 41.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: radeon temp: 42.0 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Repos:
  Packages: apt: 2413
  No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
    1: deb http: //mirror.internode.on.net/pub/linuxmint-packages vera main upstream import backport
    2: deb http: //mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/archive jammy main restricted universe multiverse
    3: deb http: //mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/archive jammy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
    4: deb http: //mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/archive jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
    5: deb http: //security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-security main restricted universe multiverse
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
    1: deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/winehq.gpg] http: //dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ jammy main
Info:
  Processes: 271 Uptime: 4m Memory: 7.72 GiB used: 1.4 GiB (18.2%) Init: systemd v: 249
  runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.3.0 alt: 11/12 Client: Unknown python3.10 client inxi: 3.3.13

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12.502s udisks2.service
11.316s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
11.155s systemd-udev-settle.service
10.144s dev-sda3.device
10.052s networkd-dispatcher.service
 9.217s ModemManager.service
 7.996s ubuntu-system-adjustments.service
 7.636s accounts-daemon.service
 6.847s systemd-journal-flush.service
 5.521s systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
 5.362s polkit.service
 4.936s avahi-daemon.service
 4.611s thermald.service
 4.608s wpa_supplicant.service
 4.608s systemd-logind.service
 4.333s systemd-modules-load.service
 4.132s ufw.service
 3.819s gpu-manager.service
 3.638s ntp.service
 3.112s NetworkManager.service
 2.733s cups.service
 2.312s systemd-sysctl.service
 2.262s apparmor.service
 1.982s networking.service
 1.912s rsyslog.service
 1.791s grub-common.service
 1.708s systemd-user-sessions.service
 1.671s e2scrub_reap.service
 1.625s lightdm.service
 1.620s plymouth-quit-wait.service
 1.546s systemd-resolved.service
 1.327s grub-initrd-fallback.service
 1.298s systemd-udev-trigger.service
 1.062s systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
  959ms systemd-udevd.service
  941ms systemd-sysusers.service
  883ms systemd-journald.service
  830ms keyboard-setup.service
  808ms systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-2D20\x2dADBB.service
  729ms systemd-random-seed.service
  667ms lm-sensors.service
  632ms zfs-load-module.service
  611ms ifupdown-pre.service
  506ms colord.service
  494ms kerneloops.service
  458ms setvtrgb.service
  440ms swapfile.swap
  389ms plymouth-start.service
  370ms alsa-restore.service
  347ms lvm2-monitor.service
  305ms systemd-remount-fs.service
  281ms zfs-volume-wait.service
  279ms dns-clean.service
lines 1-53

[MiZoG]

Reported boot time duration is absolutely normal with mechanical disks on modern Linux distros.
You can go to great lengths only to gain a few secs. Not worth your time.
Windows can boot faster on hdds using hybrid hibernation ("fast restart") but this "trick" is not without issues.

[motoryzen]

I take in old PC's and peripherals, set them up, and donate to people I come across in need. I do the work for nothing, and as much as I wish I could buy new hardware for everyone, I can't afford it.

I didn't know. * nods humbly *

Ok. Let's see if we can chip away at it

1. 9.217s ModemManager.service Given that is a desktop PC..you're not using an over the air internet service ( aka data like what Cell phones use) . modem manager service is only for that. So you can disable that with the following command below in terminal. First stop it, then with the second command..you disable it from starting back

sudo systemctl stop ModemManager. service

sudo systemctl disable ModemManager. service

2. Per rene in this post with another talking about systemd-udev-settle.service causing an even bigger delay on a user named KFGeronimo's system.....that service is deprecated aka no point in leaving it enabled anymore. for details paste the command man systemd-udev-settle.servicej in a terminal window. as well as this link

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/ma ... ice.8.html

Another user in that same post " gcristof" solved his or her 2 minute boot problem just by " masking" ( almost similar overall to disabling it ) that exact same .... service.

To disable/mask it..paste and run the following command below into a terminal window

sudo systemctl mask systemd-udev-settle.service

Thus that should shave around 19 seconds off of your boot time delay

3. how about networkd-dispatcher.service That is only needed if you're managing multiple internet connections aka that PC is your network administrator pc of managing internet connections on that same local network for other pcs to get their internet from.

If that isn't the case, as I suspect it isn't, you can safely disable that one also and shave another 10 seconds off that boot delay. but..DON'T...disable NetworkManager.service as otherwise..that will disable your internet connection to that PC.

So...again..simple terminal commands below. 1st to stop it...then 2nd to disable it..you can also remove it with the 3rd ( optional)

sudo systemctl stop systemd-networkd.service
sudo systemctl disable netword-dispatcher.service
sudo apt-get remove networkd-dispatcher

So for those three things..that shaves about 30 seconds of boot delay off of a 1 minute 10 second boot up time. That's world changing imo considering you're still running that off of a hdd and a first gen intel core series cpu.

[geekomatic]

Thanks motoryzen

In the interim of awaiting more replies, I decided to fire up another tower sitting here as a test. This one is a very low-powered ITX board, and even it can boot to a desktop in 1:55 (only 10 secs more)-- & it's a J1800 Celeron dual-core.

I'm definitely going to follow your instructions, but I honestly am shocked at an i7 quad w/HT (even 1st Gen) falling close to a Celeron. And the HDD I installed to this ITX, that too is so old-- a 7200rpm 200GB WD2000.

Thank you

[motoryzen]

Hmmm..interesting.

The one question I don't think has been asked yet here in this situation is...was the speed or lack there of ALWAYS this one on that first gen core I 7 system with Mint 21 ish mate? Or did it later show this problem.?

Makes me wonder if a fresh clean start is in order ..

[geekomatic]

Replying to be attentive, but haven't had time to test (always medical issues).

Thank you for the reply. This was a WIndows only system where the board failed. No idea the HDD at the time it was bagged.

I installed from a fresh USB.