Ubuntu slow for compute-intensive applications?

[jack action]

TL;DR Summary

Has Ubuntu got less efficient over time? Or is GNOME desktop taking that much more resources than Xfce?

I used to have Linux Lite as an OS. I like it but it has one major flaw: you cannot upgrade between series (each series is based on a Ubuntu LTS version), you have to reinstall from scratch.

I was still on series 5 (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) for which security updates ended this year. I chose to move away from Linux Lite to ease future upgrades and decided to go directly with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. What a tedious job to reinstall everything, making sure you don't lose anything along the way!

Anyway, I have a program to help me solve my daily Wordle that looks for the best initial guess. It used to take about 40 minutes to get an answer on Linux Lite with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and now it takes about 100 minutes with the basic Ubuntu 24.04 LTS! The big difference seems to only be that Linux Lite uses Xfce desktop instead of GNOME.

Any thought about this? Is it just the desktop that makes that much difference?

 

[jedishrfu]

Have you run 'top' in a window to see what Ubuntu is doing while your 'Wordle' app is running?

Some changes have been made to Ubuntu to address various exploits that may have impacted compute-intensive applications, which could be the reason for the slowdown you are experiencing.

Try using some lighter distros, such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu, or Debian XFCE.

Another option would be to run the app in a Docker container with a different version of Ubuntu, although I'm not sure that will provide much help.

 

[pbuk]

I chose to move away from Linux Lite to ease future upgrades and decided to go directly with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

You might find Mint XFCE (based on Ubuntu LTS but with an upgrade path between releases, and crucially without Ubuntu's snap-based bloatware) a better fit.

 

[jack action]

Thank you both.

I had to install snap before for a few programs that required it. I hated it and I ended up removing it. I knew it was on Ubuntu but I went with it anyway thinking it might have been improved. I was wrong, I still hate it. I found out that they are folders that even root cannot write (or delete). Big no-no for me on MY computer!

I considered Mint and saw they had their own upgrader. But with my Linux Lite experience (which was super useful to help me transition from Windows), I'm still shy for distributions depending on other distributions. (I know Ubuntu is derived from Debian but, if I understand correctly, it doesn't depends on the current Debian version, so it is independent.)

I never played much with desktop installations before, I just went with what was configured. I had no problem with XFCE before so I'll probably try to transform my Ubuntu into a XUbuntu.

I did a search and found this guide to debloat Ubuntu, especially removing snap correctly and swaping desktops.

I have remote servers where I always install Ubuntu Server and Webmin. that is my favorite setup. It is not perfect but Webmin really is a visual version of the CLI for all the basic programs that run on the computer and it is sometimes more helpful than the man of the programs to understand how they work.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Anything with a GUI will be slower than pure CLI.

 

[FactChecker]

Does your computer have enough RAM memory for the larger OS?

 

[jack action]

Anything with a GUI will be slower than pure CLI.

I'm comparing two setups with GUI.

Does your computer have enough RAM memory for the larger OS?

I have a Ryzen 3 processor with 16 GiB of RAM; it should be plenty. I even have 4 GiB of Swap, and I think I only had 2 GiB with my previous installation.

 

[FactChecker]

with 16 GiB of RAM; it should be plenty.

I agree.

 

[jack action]

OK, the problem was most likely elsewhere ... it was the program itself.

The problem is that the program is on a CRON job at night, so I never see it run. By changing OS, I haven't created the new CRON job and was running it manually.

It made a mistake once before - which I never investigate - and took the wrong list of words to analyze, and that list was longer. It did that same mistake once again but over and over. Until this morning: I could see that it used a shorter list of words and it took only half an hour.

I'm still glad I wrote the thread because yesterday it forced me to remove snap and set up other repos for my programs. It was long and painful but I feel lighter (I cleared like 40 GiB of data), in control (no more read-only SquashFS), and my profile & config files are all in my home document, where they should be.

I will still keep GNOME for the time being, though.

 

[sbrothy]

[…]I found out that they are folders that even root cannot write (or delete). Big no-no for me on MY computer! […]

No. That sounds really bad. Like being back on windoze! Not even a proper “su” followed by a “rm -rf *”?!

 

[AlexB23]

Hey guys, I am a newbie at Ubuntu only for casual stuff, but yes, Snaps are slower to load compared to Flatpak. I try to use Flatpak as much as possible.

 

[sbrothy]

I'm so used to Debian I run apt-cache and apt-get from the CLI.

 

[jack action]

No. That sounds really bad. Like being back on windoze! Not even a proper “su” followed by a “rm -rf *”?!

It uses the Squashfs file system, which is read-only (i.e., if you can't write, you cannot delete also):

Squashfs is a compressed read-only file system for Linux. Squashfs compresses files, inodes and directories, and supports block sizes from 4 KiB up to 1 MiB for greater compression. [...]

Squashfs is intended for general read-only file-system use and in constrained block-device memory systems (e.g. embedded systems) where low overhead is needed.

The snap package system also uses Squashfs as its file container format.

 

[sbrothy]

Yeah, OK. That makes sense then. Pretty specific tasks using read-only file systems, no? I realize the OS can probably write or it wouldn't make much sense. I'm getting scatterbrained again.

 

[sbrothy]

BTW, do you you use optimization switches in your build command? I mean the "-On" switches for GCC and G++? They might not make much of a difference if it's a GUI program but on the other hand it can't hurt.

EDIT: Oh it's BASH. Well yeah that's gonna be slow then.