Hello,

a friend of mine recently installed Ubuntu in his Laptop however is running really slow. It's Dell 1520 so I don't think the computer is that slow. I think what the problem is that he doesn't have a swap space. ok, I could use GPARTED to resize the HD and create SWAP space but how can I tell the system to permanently use that space?
Thanks any help is greatly appreciate it.

Add an appropriate line to /etc/fstab

Would help to know what you created, and how.


Cheers,
Tink

Tinkster, thanks for your quick response. I haven't created anything yet. I figured I could use GPARTED to create a swap partition (I think it has the option to format it or label it as swap) correct me if I'm wrong... OK I will create the line to fstab.
Thanks!

its probably best to make it about the same size as the ram
the old rule of the ram * 2 is outdated since 512 mb rams came about

see Move to swapfile rather than swap partition and the article it references at Techie Buzz. The utilities are mkswap and swapon (see man pages).

I don't think that is a correct diagnosis.

If you are correct that there is zero swap space, that is probably worth fixing, but once that is fixed, you'll probably still be trying to diagnose what is making the laptop slow.

First make sure the system doesn't already have swap space. Then make sure the HD doesn't already have a swap partition that isn't being used because it wasn't formatted as swap space or it wasn't put in /etc/fstab. If there really is no swap partition, then you might consider fixing the partitioning.

Some stats on the system and some idea about what was measured or experienced to get the idea it is slow, might help us tell you what to check to correctly diagnose why it is slow.

thank you guys for all your posts! yes, def tomorrow I will go to my friends house and take a look at it. I asked him to give me his IP so I could connect and take a look at it but he refused (I wonder why) lol I will post the results tomorrow.
Thanks!

A:how could you connect with an ip
B:he probably has a dynamic ip anyway

A: Remote Desktop
B: www.whatismyip.com (usually IP leases are for 24 hours or more)

A also recommend using a simple swap file instead of a swap partition:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/setting_up_swap.html

This is a good point. With a diagnosis offered, we get so focused on implementation we often forget the original symptoms. Unless the system is severely memory constrained, it is likely that swap isn't the issue for slowdowns.

Speeding up a laptop gets into a lot of interesting issues from power management to disk allocations to cache to video to driver quality to system trimming and runtime optimizing and then to habits and behavior.

Unless you're trying to remedy an instant need using
files is less efficient (and effective, for that matter)
than a swap partition. You get swaps built in mechanics
on top of the file-system => slower than a partition.



Cheers,
Tink

Nowadays (and for a long time now) it really doesn't matter much. The only thing you should really do -if you are really going to use a file instead of a partition- is to create the file when the fs is young and non-fragmented, to avoid any penalty due to fragmentation.

When using a swap file the kernel bypasses the fs layer. The kernel directly maps the offsets. But probably Morton can explain it better than I do.

http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/7/7/326

Thanks for that; I knew that was the advice from Andrew Morton, but hadn't seen the detail behind it. Interesting.

BTW, back on the original topic

.

Agree with that completely (and its more or less what I was about to write after having read the first post in the thread). It will be worth looking for the obvious stuff (is the disk light on all the time?) and using, eg, top/atop/htop/vmstat to see if anything jumps out as being wrong.

Also, what sort of slow is it? If it is just networking that is slow, you probably have a networking problem (at times like this, stating the painfully obvious can actually be helpful )

I'm glad to see you agree with that part of my post as well