Current Problems With Ubuntu Hardy
Now that I’ve had a chance to play around with Hardy, I’d thought I’d update my list of problems with it.
- TERRIBLE default fonts. Open /etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf and replace all occurrences of “Nimbus Sans L” and “Liberation Sans” with “DejaVu Sans” to fix them.
- Very slow and sluggish performance. Any SQL statements that perform a sequential scan, bring out the worst in it.
- Firefox Flash plugin crashes, and sometimes crashes Firefox. I’m not sure if this is because I’m on x86_64.
- Firefox extremely slow at times.
- Power Management extremely buggy.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
The Firefox problem is a Firefox problem. See http://digg.com/linux_unix/Firefox_3_has_system_killing_performance_problem_for_Linux
In short, FF3 uses SQLite to store it’s bookmarks, history, etc. SQLite calls fsync() to flush buffers to disk to avoid DB corruption. These happen extremely often, which causes heavy I/O congestion. Ext3 exacerbates the issue.
You might find that your DB performance increases if you quit Firefox. A seq scan will hit disk, and Firefox is there tying up your I/O.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I’m using ReiserFS. In addition, I ran all my tests with nothing running, except for GNOME. Performance is literally 10x slower in some areas, compared to Feisty.