How to improve Unity Performance?

ubuntu-netbook unity

7,090

Solution 1

Installing Unity 2D might work better on your hardware, it's the supported fallback desktop.

Solution 2

A specific answer to your 'files and folders being slow' query is that this is a known issue in Nautilus. To see this really in action open /usr/lib or /usr/bin. Basically nautilus has this feature where to looks to identify file types, etc, and this can take a while, specially on slow spinning disks.

One fix here is to change your file manager to pcmanfm, which is a lightweight file manager and skips the file lookup stuff that nautilus does. This thread should outline how-to - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=692238

Your desktop will still be rendered via nautilus, but you can change all other filemanager actions to this filemanager, and have lookups be speedy.

Solution 3

I have some problems with Acer Aspire One which are coming from fact that SSD drive in this netbook is very cheap and slow. I guess, that is not necessary Unity fault that everything is slow.

There are many tips about performance of Ubuntu on this hardware.

7,090

Severo Raz

HW: Lenovo 80K9 OS: Archlinux 64-bit

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Severo Raz over 1 year

I installed ubuntu netbook edition on my netbook* expecting to get the best performance out of it, but apparently, that didn't turn out.
Unity is a bit slow on it, and when I click on Files and folders it takes a while to load the respective interface and the bar at the top disappears and then loads in.

Is this expected? Is there anything I can do to improve the performance? Is this problem specific to my netbook?

*Netbook info:
Acer - Aspire One
1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor
1 GB RAM Memory
Intel GMA 950 graphics card
- badp over 13 years
  
  Unity is at its first public release...
- Michael Gundlach over 13 years
  
  This is too vague of a question to be objectively answered here. For extended support on items please try the Ubuntu Forums or via IRC. You may also want to search LaunchPad to see if this has already been reported as a bug.
- Severo Raz over 13 years
  
  Can you revisit my question? I have implemented some suggestions as to make my question more 'answerable'.
- Michael Gundlach over 13 years
  
  Reopened in light of edits
- Psyconn over 12 years
  
  Ubuntu 11.10 didn't find drivers for my GMA 950 so the slow response could be because there is no hardware acceleration.
- Eliah Kagan about 10 years
  
  possible duplicate of Unity runs slow, how can I improve its performance?
Severo Raz over 13 years

Yeah... you're right about my expectation :^P anyway, I guess I'll just give Unity some time to grow, meanwhile I'll be using it. I'm not using this netbook all the time, so its not that much of a big deal to have it slow down a bit with some tasks.
NightwishFan over 13 years

I like Unity as well however that is not really an answer.. :/
Admin over 13 years

The problem is there is no answer. There was an update to Unity a couple of days ago, but I haven't tried it. I've started using a minimilistic desktop version and cairo-dock which is working better.
Severo Raz over 13 years

Yes, as soon as I found out about Unity 2D, I installed it right away. And let me tell you, its a huge difference. Its probably the best solution up to now, but I hope they fix the original Unity because it looks a bit more polished.