[arch-general] System terribly slow

Iyán Méndez Veiga me at iyanmv.com
Sat Dec 4 00:33:49 UTC 2021


Hi,

On Saturday, 4 December 2021 01:07:18 CET riveravaldez via arch-general wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking for some advice trying to pinpoint why or where my system has
> becoming almost unusable slow. Searching the web I've found some hints
> but nothing precise enough. Maybe it's a failing HDD, but I'm first posting
> what I have until now in the hope someone can give some advice.

Have you check SMART health status of your disks? Maybe also run some self-
tests to discard HDD issues. A HDD about to die can make system incredible 
slow.

> Superficial symptoms are a general slowness. I'm using just IceWM and
> `startx` to initialize the GUI, and even logging into my account previous to
> that takes almost a minute to get done. Then any application I launch takes
> minutes to just start (from IceWM to firefox, from qtox to pcmanfm or
> geany, etc.). Even navigate the folders tree with pcmanfm takes 10 or more
> seconds just to show any folder content...

Do you have a single disk or more than one? If so, do you feel a difference 
navigating directories that are physically in different disks?

Also, to discard other hardware problems, can you boot arch (or any other 
distro) on a USB and check if system is more responsive.

Another thing you can check is the CPU freq. If CPU too hot, modern CPUs will 
throttle a lot. Although if you have a HDD I don't think this is the case... 
anycase, it's a quick think to check temperature and frequency.

Also, did the slowness start after updating any BIOS/firmware?

Maybe also run some memtest?

Hope it helps.

-- 
Iyán Méndez Veiga
GPG: 0x422E3694311E5AC1
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