My old laptop died so I moved the hard drive (samsung SSD) to a newer but still old “hp elite desk 800 G3” system I had laying around. It booted right up and it’s really decent but a little sluggish. I’d like to hold off on buying a new computer for a few years. It has a i7-7700T processor, 16G of ram and a Samsung 2.5 ssd. I’m planing on upgrading to 32G ram and considering pros of a nvme ssd to replace the sata one… does it make a big difference?
I’m running KDE plasma 6 on tumbleweed. I was hoping for a little more zip or pep if you will. It just seems a little sluggish with really nothing going on. To be clear the overall system seems a little sluggish. KDE, application open time etc. Switching to wayland helped a little with some slight video tearing I had and seems to make kde a little snappier.
I was wondering what tips and tricks you guys have on tuning a little for better performance on older hardware to squeeze a little more out but still remain stable? For example what about changing the kernel scheduler or something like that? I know there’s a few to choose from. Some KDE tuning tips? Zram? etc…
It’s just a basic (kde) tumbleweed install that I’ve been using for about five years …so btrfs and no drive encryption or anything like that.
IME with two Kaby Lake GT2 desktops, one with i3 and one with i5, there is a noticeable difference when SSD and NVME are compared back-to-back. This is confirmed by 3X or more speed from NVME in I/O testing with hdparm -t. But, how big is big? My daily driver is i3-7100T with 32G RAM. Whether noticeable equates to “big” is in the experience of the user.
Thanks, I’ll look into a decent nvme then, that should give it a little zip when opening things for the first time. I feel like there’s some kernel, ram and kde tweaks that can help make it a little snappier while retaining reliability.
Likely snappier can be had by disabling some of the things Plasma automatically starts in the background. I turn off about 3/4 of them, and anything else I can that’s blingy.
One more interesting option I saw was upgrading the motherboard with a G4/G5 motherboard that supports newer CPU’s, that board, L65200-001, I could get for 40 Euro second hand.
A NVMe will be faster but you really won’t see a lot of benefit from it. Still, it’s a good upgrade and it’ll be ready to plug into a newer machine when you get one.
One of the best performance tweaks has to do with web browsing. If you mainly use it for the web, then you for sure want a RAM Disk for your browser cache. It also saves tons of writes to the SSD over the years. You’ll notice the speed increase of your browser.
Putting this in your fstab will create the RAM disk in /tmp
It’ll automatically grow as needed. You have 16GB of RAM and it’ll take a lot of browsing to get 500MB in the cache. I’ve done this since the spinner days and it really helps with a standard HDD!
none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
Make a bin folder in your home directory if you don’t already have one. Make a file in bin called ramdisk-browsers.sh and make it executable. I don’t use Firefox so it’s not listed. This also clears your cache when you reboot etc.
Then run it from your .bash_profile file.
Note that’s a hidden file in your home directory. You’ll have to enable show hidden files.
Just add this line at the end of the bash profile file.
That’s odd, it still says that but top, htop, dstat etc show different. The system is under no load right now…just firefox no videos or anything else other than me responding to your post. See how inxi still shows this but top and dstat don’t. I already upgraded the hp, it came with a 6th gen I5 and I upgraded to the I7 for the extra threading. I don’t think it’s a processor issue, it shows up correctly in the bios as well. I’m upgrading the ram and drive …because why not. I wished the proc could handle 2666Mhz ram though.
I feel like it’s something to do with the video card / driver and or maybe kde itself. I tried a ubuntu live cd and it seemed smoother. I’m going to look for a few other linux distros that have good live cd’s to test as well.
Looking at your stats again I think you could benefit from more RAM
Swap is already used 20% and swap is know to cause sluggishness. For me it cause extreme sluggishness so I did decided to disable it, add more memory and installed early–oom.
An alternative is to see what is using the RAM and try to see if you can get that down.
Yes, I do plan on getting 32g of ram. Firefox is my main culprit on that…I do a lot of surfing and research etc and have a tone of tabs open. FF and chrome both are horrible on ram but they also work the best.
Think I’m going to play with some kernel tweaks, I was hoping there was some good tips for opensuse on this here…arch seems to have some good info if anybody is ever interested.
What bothers me the most right now is when I scroll the text isn’t smooth, it gets blurry as it’s scrolling. Once I stop it’s fine. I do have smooth scrolling in FF turned on.
One thing I don’t quite understand is why I’m swapping so much when htop or top shows that I’m only using about half of ram. What I see is cache that might be using the other half but isn’t cache supposed to be freed by the kernel when needed?