LinuxMusicians

I recently upgraded from KXstudio 14.04 to the current version of Ubuntu Studio, and I'm wondering whether anybody has any insights on the system performance issues I'm seeing.

I'm a very casual user. Most of my computer use is websurfing, e-mail, Libreoffice, and very light gaming like online Flash games. I like to use an audio-oriented distro so that once in a while I can fire up a DAW or some virtual synths and play around a little. My system is a Intel i5-4590 with 12GB of RAM. I didn't have any performance issues with KXstudio; I only upgraded because it was getting harder to keep programs working in the older Linux version. (I know, rookie mistake.)

Since switching I've noticed some real problems. YouTube videos stutter and lag for the first minute or so, whether I'm watching them in Firefox or Brave (I use both for various reasons). Same thing goes for Flash games, although with them it persists, not improving after a few minutes like the Youtube videos do. Any games relying on timing, which is to say most of them, are unplayable. Webpages load/display very slowly. Needless to say, I doubt there's much point in trying to do any real-time audio work when the system freezes and lags like this.

I've run an experiment using an autoclicker in a Flash game. If I set it to click 10 times per second, I see a cyclical (but irregular) pattern. The system is fine for 30 seconds to a minute, accepting clicks at pretty much the full rate. Then the lags kick in, the game slows way down, and the clicks only register one per every second or two, again for thirty seconds to a minute.

Any ideas? Are there even any system logs, etc., I could check to see if something's intermittently starting and stopping?

You should find the system log files in /var/log. Have a look and see if there's anything interesting during a time when your systems slows down..

You can also open a terminal and type "top" to see a regularly updating list of running processes and how much system resources they are using. You might find your answer by watching this list during a slowdown.

I migrated from Solus to Ubuntu Studio, and general performance seems to have taken a significant hit for me as well. Everything is really sluggish compared.

Does your current distro use Wayland and Gnome3? On my old laptop I could not use Debian 10 because of that (too sluggish). Re-installed Debian 10 w/ Xorg and Mate: probs gone.

I've just installed Ubuntu Studio 19 as well. The 1st and default GRUB option is for the low latency Kernel. Perhaps if you are just doing regular non audio stuff you might try booting using the normal kernel.

My only problems with Ubuntu Studio at the moment are:
a) Sometimes when it boots up, the mouse movement is very jerky. Requires a reboot to recover as the system is unusable this way. Happens one out of five times maybe?
b) I do continue to get infrequent application crashes in complicated JACK setups. Sometimes it's not the app I was interacting with directly that crashes, which is a head scratcher.
c) Sometimes the whole system locks up or reboots spontaneously. I just try to make sure I save my work compulsively.

But then sometimes I leave a multi-application setup running for an hour while I do something else and I come back and it's still going. So it's not generally unstable, just occasionally. That said, a reboot is a reboot and shouldn't need to happen.

I am using this with an Athlon X4 740 CPU which is pretty low spec, 8 GB RAM, Behringer USB audio interface. I think I'm going to stick with US for the time being.

You can watch the journal live with :

Use 'Ctrl+c' to exit.

Flash still exists, isn't it (soon, end 2020) no longer maintained by Adobe https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/?
Flash was and has always been a huge security hole. I haven't installed Flash for years and would recommend you to uninstall it.

Install and run Fluxbox or XFCE to test (for large desktops use the tasksel utility https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Tasksel).