How can I improve the computer performance? [closed]

Question

My laptop is a 12 year old Compaq 610, 4GB DDR2, not upgradable chipset (Mobile Intel GLE960 Express), Core 2 Duo T5870, 320GB HDD and 240GB SSD, Windows 10 x64. System boots fast but performance isn't.

Earlier I tried Linux Mint 18 using 8gb of swap space from SSD, was able to load, minimize applications (up to 4), but wasn't able to work on them.

Requires heavy multitasking like MySQL, Spring Tool Suite, NPM, Atom, Postman, Docker and Firefox. Not to forget PDF reader, Spreadsheet etc.

As of now, doing one task at a time, really annoying. RAM usage exceeds 90% with only MySQL and Spring Tool. CPU is 100% used. Most annoying thing is computer freezes every other minute or two if I open another application.

Idle usage is between 35-40%, no heavy application processes. Disabled startup programs, killing unwanted processes over and again. Tried disabling cache, did startup changes, no improvement.

I need the Spring Tool to be running all the time with MySQL, and that leaves me no RAM space to run other of those above mentioned applications. Possibly the culprit here is to little RAM and underpowered CPU.

What can be done improve the multitasking and general computer performance in this scenario?

Answer 1

Windows 7, 8, and 10 64-bit need a minimum of 8 GB to run decently - 16 GB for heavier loads. That exceeds the limit of memory for your machine.

The hard drive is likely 5400-rpm which will slow down the computer enormously under heavy load.

Since the machine is 12 years old, you need to consider a new and faster machine.

You can try upgrading the hard drive to an SSD and that will help if it will work with the older BIOS and computer. Still, I would hesitate investing money in this machine. Put it toward a new computer.

Answer 2

John’s answer is great, but there’s more that can be expanded on here to explain why you are having such issues.

First off, I think it’s worth mentioning that depending on what you are doing, Linux will run fine on a system with only 32MB of RAM, and you can go even lower than that in rare cases through aggressive customization. Such setups are only really useful for single-purpose network appliances though (like routers). 4GB can be enough for desktop usage with Linux, but only with very lightweight desktop environments like XFCE or LXDE. Windows, as John mentioned, needs at least 8GB to run comfortably. The caveat to this though is that for a 12 year old machine, 4GB may be the absolute best it can do. That was a reasonable amount of memory a decade ago for a portable system like a laptop.

There are three other issues though.

The first is that a Core 2 Duo is not really an appropriate processor for the development work it sounds like you are trying to do. It’s not particularly fast (for a client system at least), doesn’t have good parallelism, and arguably most importantly has at best mediocre cache performance. It’s theoretically acceptable though (2GHz is actually right about the clock speed for a lot of modern server processors, and they obviously do fine with workloads like you are talking about), were it not for the fact that it’s the cause of the other limitations. There’s nothing you can do about this though, because the CPU is soldered to the mainboard (that model of CPU was only available in a BGA package).

The second issue is that you probably have at best SATA 2 support for the storage device. This translates to half the theoretical bandwidth you would get from the same SSD in a modern system, which means that the SSD is only really reducing your latency, not improving your throughput (a good HDD from that era could actually saturate a SATA 2 link under some circumstances, which is why SATA 3 was developed). This performance limitation is going to seriously impact system usability when you have to hit swap or the pagefile, which is going to happen more often because you have only 4GB of RAM and are trying to run a memory-intensive workload. There’s nothing you can do about this either, because SATA support is a function of the chipset, which quite simply cannot be changed on laptops.

The third, and probably biggest after total RAM capacity, issue is that you’re dealing with DDR2-800 RAM. That is, quite simply, so slow as to not be practically usable for any modern memory-intensive workload, and the issue is further compounded by the poor cache size and performance of the CPU, and actually makes the SATA performance limitations even worse (the RAM is actually slower than your SATA link, which means that the RAM is the limiting factor for your storage performance). This is, yet again, not something you can do anything about because it’s a property of the CPU itself.

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Overall the general assessment is that you need to just replace the system. If you don’t need the mobility of a laptop, I would probably suggest looking at an NUC. One of the older i3 or i5 models plus 8GB of RAM and an inexpensive SSD will cost you about 500-700 USD and make this old laptop look pathetic in comparison, and will probably use less power too. If it needs to be a laptop, I’m at a bit of a loss for a recommendation, as all the brands I would recommend are either likely to be well beyond your price range, or are completely sold out right now.

Answer 3

You noted it even struggles to run Puppy Linux decently. While ancient and absolutely outdated, it shouldn't be that abhorrent.

Try looking at the chipset temperatures when working on the laptop? Do they rise quickly, with the fan constantly running?

Redoing the very old thermal compound between the CPU and heat sink might improve performance there.

Answer 4

I've run machines with less, and it very much comes down to being realistic.

I've very much used machines like that as a 'general purpose desktop' - but you're pretty much running a server on it. You've made most of the upgrades you could to get the most out of a machine, but a geriatric terrier isn't winning a greyhound race.

While it needs a reinstall - if memory serves, there's a IDE and AHCI mode for SATA, and you need to change your storage to use AHCI mode in the bios to get the full performance out of a SSD if you haven't already.

Getting a more modern machine is the sensible option (and you have more upgrading headroom) - but out of scope here. You might wish to consider that 12 years pretty much is almost 3x the 'design' life of these laptops. Its even outlasted the company that made it.

Mint's pretty heavy though - in this scenario I'd try to see if debian works, with an LXDE desktop environment. If even that's bogged down, you're going to be unable to run anything resembling a modern system with your requirements.

You might be able to get some life out of the laptop by running it cli only but I notice many gui applications in your list.

Answer 5

Under Linux you can do a few things:

• Use compressed RAM and compressed swap (zram, zswap).
• Play around with swappinness settings.
• Put swap on the SSD (if you are using zram, make sure this one has a lower priority so it gets used after the zram swap).
• Use an early out of memory (OOM) killer e.g. EarlyOOM. The default Linux OOM killer completely freezes your system for several minutes when you run out of memory until it finally kills a process.
• Use a lightweight distro and lightweight desktop environment. Maybe even think about running a 32bit distro since they should need less RAM. However I think most 32bit distros don’t make use of extended CPU instruction sets except SSE2.
• Disable/kill anything you don’t need: cupsd (printing daemon), Bluetooth daemon/applet etc. etc.
• Think about your program choices and try to configure/use them for low memory. For example use an Adblocker in Firefox.
• Make sure your laptop does not overheat, has no faulty RAM, faulty HDD etc.

Don’t expect too much, especially if you are running applications which can eat >2GB of RAM on their own.

Answer 6

Requires heavy multitasking like MySQL, Spring Tool Suite, NPM, Atom, Postman, Docker and Firefox. Not to forget PDF reader, Spreadsheet etc.

As of now, doing one task at a time, really annoying. RAM usage exceeds 90% with only MySQL and Spring Tool. CPU is 100% used. Most annoying thing is computer freezes every other minute or two if I open another application.

Others answers covers much of the problem, so here are some extra tips when upgrading hardware is not an option:

• use Vim / Emacs as your editor
• Downgrade to an older browser version if you can, they have lower memory footprint
• cheat and run your server applications in the cloud. You can do this with your development application, the mysql server etc ...
• cheat and run your mem-intensive GUIs in a remote desktop, and VNC into them (or remote X server ?).

There are some hosting/cloud providers with free plans for low usage, maybe you could take advantage of it. Provided, of course, you have stable internet connection.