Maverick Meerkat too slow on Acer Aspire One A110

I had expanded my A110 to 1,5GB ram 3 weeks after buying it, so I cannot test how fast it would work with only half a gigabyte of RAM... ...but on my computer the following things made it quite fast:
 - putting the /var/log and the /tmp directory on a tmpfs filesystem whose contents is kept in RAM instead of the SSD
 - uninstalling any indexing service like beagle or tracker
 - telling firefox to use asynchronous I/O (see http://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne for details)
 - setting the root partition to use the ext2 filesystem and not ext3 or ext4 (which are both journalling) in /etc/fstab
 - and setting the noatime mount option for my root filesystem in /etc/fstab - which reduces the number of write accesses to the disk drastically because without this option the linux filesystem remembers when you have last *read* a file - which means every read of a file is followed by a write of this information.

What I did, too, was to follow the rules found under https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne to strongly discourage swapping.

If you ever give Meerkat another try a

sudo swapoff -a

to see if the problem was related to the computer using the swap partition too much.

I had expanded my A110 to 1,5GB ram 3 weeks after buying it, so I cannot test how fast it would work with only half a gigabyte of RAM... ...but on my computer the following things made it quite fast:
 - putting the /var/log and the /tmp directory on a tmpfs filesystem whose contents is kept in RAM instead of the SSD
 - uninstalling any indexing service like beagle or tracker
 - telling firefox to use asynchronous I/O (see http://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne for details)
 - setting the root partition to use the ext2 filesystem and not ext3 or ext4 (which are both journalling) in /etc/fstab
 - and setting the noatime mount option for my root filesystem in /etc/fstab - which reduces the number of write accesses to the disk drastically because without this option the linux filesystem remembers when you have last *read* a file - which means every read of a file is followed by a write of this information.

What I did, too, was to follow the rules found under https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne to strongly discourage swapping.

If you ever give Meerkat another try a

sudo swapoff -a

to see if the problem was related to the computer using the swap partition too much.

Just to list what I did try
did not try Ext2, not well up on partitioning in Linux
did noatime
set up the temp in RAM
set swapping to minimum (using 10.04 methods, not sure if things have changed)
did all the speeing up changes to Firefox, though the constant disc access was general, not just Firefox.

I will try it again sometime, but have to check how to do the partitioning. Does it make that much difference< my 10.04 is Ext4, and works fine.

Also log a bug. Maverick is NOT released and NOT ready

On a SSD in the worst case ext4 is only half as fast as ext2: Ext4 is very intelligent and it tries to keep the file system always consistent and fragmentation low at the same time by writing things first to a journal - and only to the real place on the disk when
 - the disk isn't busy otherwise
 - the computer already knows how big the file will be
 - it is easy to determine where to put the file to keep the necessity for movements of the read/write head of the hard disk as low as possible
...and it will write all things to the disk in an order that makes sure that the disk is in a consistent state regardless of when a power failure occours.

Loads of intelligent stuff and it makes the computer much faster in most of the cases.

But with a SSD disk that is extremely slow when writing and that freezes the computer whilst doing so --- this means you are using up to two times the amount of write cycles you originaly had to.

The good news is that ext2 and ext4 differ only in which features of the file system are used. So if you change the file system's entry in /etc/fstab from ext4 to ext2 if you didn't use any of ext4's esotheric features - you will use it as ext2.

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For the last 3 days my computer (also a AOA110L) was extremely slow when using USB drives. Removing loads of stuff from the .comfig and the .gconf directories of my home directory solved this. Currently it runs real fast again.