Lucid 10.04 much slower than Hardy on same hardware

To limit the firefox problem, check to see if you have the open source player "gnash" installed -- this can perform very slowly -- Adobe's flash is much faster, but if you don't use flash, disabling flash entirely is of course fastest (but remember most websites still use flash for displaying videos).

I also recommend installing the "noscript" and "adblock" addons -- javascript is just plain slow, and always will be, particularly on poorly written websites. Using noscript will prevent firefox from executing javascript unless you whitelist the site.

Adblock will prevent animated advertisements from running, which slow down CPU and network.

Finally, I would check hdparm too, it could be that your hard drives are not performing properly. Your hardware may still be using IDE drives without DMA mapping; this would slow down all disk access, and would account for your situation where you are seeing fast speeds once loaded, but slow speeds for anything that is disk intensive (file manager, firefox,). Check to see if DMA is enabled.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DMA

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=932761

If you install LXDE, log off and log in to the LXDE session.Is it better?

"actionparsnip", THANK YOU(!) for recommending LXDE! Never heard of it before. It's in the repository, so I installed it and tried it. Works great!! Very fast! Way faster than Hardy Heron was on this machine! I also never knew about the "session" selections. I do now. That's really handy!

I got used to Gnome and liked it, but it certainly appears that Gnome was my main problem here. Also, LXDE has a tiny graphic CPU monitor on its taskbar by default. It shows the CPU maxed-out heavily when Firefox is actually loading a page. So there's another part of my problem. But now I can see it. I really like Firefox, and I depend heavily on XMarks for coordinating my bookmarks between multiple systems. So I will likely keep using it. But I will not be blaming Ubuntu for what Gnome and Firefox were doing.

(Just discovered that XMarks is also made for Chromium, which is also in the Ubuntu 10.04 repository. I'll try that.)

"mycae", thank you for your suggestions. I find that I do not have "gnash" installed. Using Adobe. Also, I do indeed use NoScript and AdBlock. Great tools! Love them! Looked into hdparm. Not sure its info would help, as the hardware has not changed one bit between Hardy and Lucid, yet Lucid has been sooo much slooower.

Now, apparently, we see why.

Yeah firefox is pretty bad with system resources and is the main reason I hate it. LXDE is a lot lighter and doesn't use Gnome / Metacity but uses LXDE / Openbox, It's not as glossy but it does a fine job. There is a (now Canonical official) release called Lubuntu which is made to be small, fast and efficient.

Glad you got the gold :)

UPDATE:
XMarks does indeed work with the Chromium web browser. Chromium offered to import my bookmarks from Firefox, and then did so perfectly.

Chromium is substantially faster than Firefox. No more dreary waiting for pages.

LXDE has a default browser icon on its taskbar (bottom of screen). This activates LXDE's default Gnome browser made with Webkit. It's fast and light, but doesn't use XMarks.

Using LXDE, click on the the triangular LXDE logo at the far left of the taskbar, then point to "Internet". All available browsers appear in a popup menu. Just select Chromium. Quick and simple.

Also in LXDE, with html files, one can right-click on the icon, select "Open with" and get an immediate handy list of available browsers. Also quick and simple.

Works great. With LXDE and Lucid 10.04, this 10-year-old 1GHz machine is now the fastest machine in our house! Previously it was by far the slowest.

1ghz is plenty of power. I suggest you use minitube instead of going to youtube's site. It doesn't use flash which can chew low end systems.