Ubuntu

Installing upgrade really slow

Asked by ibob63

Hi,

I have been running ubuntu for about a year but now installing and upgrading software is just painfully slow. Synaptic in both simple and advanced mode are super slow and when the updates happen my computer almost always crashes and I have to crtl-alt-backspace.

The rest of the software is very quick and responsive and I use the computer all day everyday. But I dread the updates as they take forever. Any ideas for speeding things up would be gratefully received,

The computer is an AMD 64, hp nx9105 laptop.

Thanks,

James

p.s This seems to be unique to this machine, as i have six other ubuntu machines in the office which alway update very quickly.

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Lætitia A Delvaux (ntw0nlaeti) said : 		#1

Maybe the apt-get spool directory is full? Try 'apt-get clean' to see if it solves things. Do you have an ouput of 'df'?

If not, you'll have to diagnostic this problem a bit further, try running 'top' in a terminal when running an update process to see what are the processes being so slow and what kind of action is the cpu doing: in the 'Cpu' line of top output, is the max percentage is in us, sy, id or wa mode?

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Best ibob63 (james-tuthill) said : 		#2

Hi Antoine,

Thanks for your help. I have run apt-get clean and run df ( who's output is shown below.) Anyhow, after running top and free, I think that the computer was running out of memory. For some reason the swap space wasn't configured. Now the updates seem to run faster - but I will have to wait to next time to get a true test.

Thanks once again for your help,
Yours,

James

df output:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 56214364 44528616 8830196 84% /
varrun 255052 192 254860 1% /var/run
varlock 255052 4 255048 1% /var/lock
procbususb 10240 104 10136 2% /proc/bus/usb
udev 10240 104 10136 2% /dev
devshm 255052 0 255052 0% /dev/shm
lrm 255052 20844 234208 9% /lib/modules/2.6.17-11-generic/volatile

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Lætitia A Delvaux (ntw0nlaeti) said : 		#3

Yep, swap space is something very useful! And apt uses quite a lot of memory when calculating dependencies.