so im not sure if this is update related or storage related. somewhere online told me to check ‘page faults’ and theyre at 16998 MINFL and 114 MAJFL. i ran out of storage on my ssd so i clesred half of it by deleting timeshift snapshots (and disabled it). it’s still running like a slug. once an application is open, it’s fine. but beforehand? it takes 20 seconds to open vlc. loading a new .mp3 audio for vlc takes maybe 10 or so. it started before the update when i totallt ran our of stroage so i assume it’s that. im confused as to if it’s some process stealing resources.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    0·
    10 months ago

    I’m seeing two likely reasons here:

    1. Your drive may be dying. If it suddenly becomes read only, scramble to get a hard drive and copy off data as soon as you can, because the moment the computer turns off or goes to sleep all data is gone.

    2. You deleted a whole bunch of stuff but the drive didn’t get TRIM’d. The fast write cache was used up for storage as a last resolve and now the tricks SSDs use to make you think they’re fast all the times are failing. Check the status of the fstrim timer (systemctl status fstrim.timer) and see if it has run since your last cleanup. If it hasn’t, your SSD is probably still writing files as if it’s almost full, which will be awful for performance. In that case, starting the fstrim service and letting it do its thing may revive the drive to its old speed.

    Page faults only explain why the system is slow, it doesn’t say much about the SSD itself.

    The problem with a slow SSD, in your case, is that trimming a malfunctioning drive may make your life worse, but it can be very hard to see if an SSD is actually malfunctioning. Check the SMART statistics of the drive (I think the partition manager in mint can show you those?) and check if the number of errors is ticking up. A few errors here and there aren’t a problem (could literally be the result of an unfortunate ray from outer space {but large numbers or consistently climbing numbers are a problem.

    I would check if my important documents and family photos are backed up, run the TRIM, see if it helps. If it doesn’t, I’d do a more thorough backup of most files and reboot after the TRIM, fingers crossed.

    • jackpot@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      what command would you use to trim on linux mint, the drive isnt dying to my knowledge. i just ran smartctl and it says i have 0 unallocated nvm capacity?

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        0·
        10 months ago

        sudo systemctl start fstrim should do the trick.

        You can also try manually running sudo fstrim --all if the service doesn’t work for some reason. If that command doesn’t exist, you may need to apt install the fstrim command (I’m not sure what the right package is on Mint).

        Also check if you actually deleted the files (i.e. they’re not in a recycling bin somewhere). You can use df -h / for that.