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Startup of desktop environment is geting progresively slower over time

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Prokop Hapala

I have ubuntu 18.04 installed for >3 years with Xfce desktop environment. Over the last year the startup of desktop environment (i.e. time from log-in before disk finish crunching) became untolerably long (>5minutes?).

This is strange because

  1. I expect linux does not have the same issues as Windows which slow it down over time (Windows gets progressively slower over time, why doesn't Ubuntu?)
  2. Xfce environment should be most light-weight of all desktop environments.

My ideas what could be the cause:

  • I'm pretty sure the slow down has something to do with some disk operations, because the disk crunch terribly.

  • I also think it has something to do with some internet app, because I'm unable to load any web page before the disk finishes to crunch.

  • I was thinking the issue was due to dropbox sync. Really wen I switch of dropbox the startup is significantly faster. But it is not all, even without dropbox it takse lot of time.

  • I would like to investigate what exactly does this huge ammaunt of disk I/O operations in internet access at startup. But I don't know how to do it, especially when the system is a bit frozen and interaction is lagging.

I have read many general articles how to speed up linux startup, e.g. this. But it is to unspecific.

Question:

  • How to investigate what exact app takes most of disk I/O and internet access operations at startup of desktop environment?

  • Are there some processes (e.g. file indexing for search, pre-loading shard libraries ...) which can become more and more demanding a as system gets older (with more files and programs to manage) ? I would like to turn of all such processes.

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us flag
Archisman Panigrahi
This might happen if your HDD is dying. Install GNOME disk and check the disk health. https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/disk-check.html.en
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MWB avatar Ubuntu
br flag
MWB

In my opinion, the most likely cause of this is an accumulation of snaps you might have installed over the years. Try

$ snap list

to see what they are.

In general, to see which processes are (currently) doing a lot of I/O, you can use iotop. To see what's using a lot of RAM, you can use htop and then F6 ("SortBy") PERCENT_MEM.

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