Cinnamon Performance -- It was Chrome's Fault

I've written lately about my struggles with sluggish Ubuntu and Mint desktops. Finally, I discovered that Chrome was the problem. At one point in my ramblings, I recommended using Mate instead of Cinnamon. Well, I'm happy to report that my slow Dell Vostro 1440 runs Cinnamon just fine, as long as I'm not running Chrome.

Ubuntu and Mint Very Slow

I've been struggling for some time with poor performance of Ubuntu, and now Mint, on my Dell Vostro 1440. Admittedly it's a cheap laptop, but in this day and age a Linux desktop should run decently on pretty much anything, as long as you're not using a lot of fancy desktop effects.

Running top I was seeing a lot of wait time. When the performance was really bad, I'd see over 90 percent wait time. Typically I'd be dipping into swap space when performance was bad, but it would be bad without swapping (I "only" have 2 GB of RAM). I would see this when running only Thunderbird and Chrome, although Chrome with a lot of tabs open.

I spent many frustrating hours Googling for performance issues on Ubuntu or Mint and didn't find anything really promising.

Finally, last weekend I was dropping off some old computer gear for recycling at our local Free Geek and saw a pretty sweet Dell laptop for sale. I started playing with it, partly to see how it performed. They sell used computers with Ubuntu, and Ubuntu comes with Firefox. Firefox was snappy as all get out, and on a lower powered CPU than mine at home.

So I went home and tried Firefox. It works great. So I started Googling performance problems with Chrome on Linux and got all sorts of hits. This one looks like it's turning into a bit of an omnibus bug report, but has some good info and links to other places.

It looks like one factor is that Google has made its own Flash viewer, since Adobe is no longer supporting new versions of Flash on Linux. Many people report disabling the Google Flash viewer helps, but it didn't work for me.

Others report that it is indeed due to memory usage of Chrome with many tabs. Others report that it has something to do with using hardware graphics rendering, that the hardware is actually slower. Still others report issues with Chrome scanning for devices, and particularly webcams.

My gut says it's a combination of things -- perhaps all of the above are involved, but you only see the performance problem when two or more of the factors coincide.

I haven't found a solution that works for me yet, so I'm somewhat reluctantly using Firefox. It's certainly a lot faster than it was two years ago. However, I miss the combined link and search field in Chrome, amongst other things. It does seem like Firefox has stolen most of Chrome's good ideas, so it's not as hard as I thought it might be to readjust.

Use Mate with Cheap Hardware

[Update: This whole post is a lie. See how Chrome is the culprit here. and see my confirmation that Cinnamon is fine here.]

A few weeks ago I switched to Linux Mint and chose the Cinnamon desktop. That turned out to be a disaster with my cheap Dell laptop (Vostro 1440). The performance was excruciatingly slow -- apps would take tens of seconds to open, the mouse would freeze, etc. Switching to Mate has made it bearable. Unfortunately, switching the desktop, while doable (Google it) doesn't work perfectly. I have duplicate items in some menus, or multiple ways to do the same thing. I never know when I'm going to see Nautilus or Caja when I open a folder.

I also suspect, based on what I was seeing while trying to debug the performance problem, that a 5400 RPM drive just doesn't cut it for a desktop user. The minute I dip into swap space, performance starts to fall off. I guess what I really should say is that 5400 RPM disk plus 2 GB of RAM doesn't cut it. That would solve the swapping. However, I would expect the slow drive would still slow initial program start-up.

Goodbye Ubuntu Desktop

As of about three weeks ago I'm using Linux Mint 13 with the Cinnamon desktop. I don't even know what half of that means. I'm just doing what comes up by default. It's nice to be back to a desktop that works for content producers -- not that I produce that much content.

[Edit: Cinnamon runs fine on a low-powered computer like a Dell Vostro 1440, but don't try to use Chrome.]