Tweaking lubuntu for speed.

Lubuntu has been going well, but seems to be slowing down. We're running Firefox and Thunderbird, so maybe they are creating ever larger caches? Dunno, so all suggestions welcome. This machine has an SSD and 512KB of memory.

Tweaks done so far -
1) noatime and nodiratime in fstab.
2) A few tweaks to swapinness etc. in /etc/sysctrl.conf
3) Reduced size of caches in Firefox and Thunderbird.
4) Turned off Global Indexing in Thunderbird.

Tweaks on the list to try -
Add more memory and turn off swap.
Turn off journalling on ext4.
Try a hard disk in place of the SSD.

Ideas for more tweaks very welcome. When the machine is going slow, the HD light is lit for 10s of seconds at a time, and the cursor even stops responding at times. Something is wrong, but what? It's a shame as it was *really* fast to begin with.

Ian

 

viewtopic.php?f=28&t=23550&hilit=+lubuntu

 

OK, I've done pretty much everything people mentioned, and a bit more.

I also stuck another 1GB of memory in the machine for just over a tenner as once I'd turned off swap entirely, it was at about 75% memory usage with just Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype and Dropbox running.

It's looking good so far.

Ian