r/Ubuntu • u/Grouchy_Ad5305 • 1d ago

Ubuntu Lagging

Is anyone else's ubuntu been lagging lately?

2 days ago it was completely fine, i could open multiple apps and tabs and it would run smoothly but since then it has started to lag on the most basic tasks (like changing between tabs/apps or even clicking buttons)

I always praise ubuntu for how smooth it is (maybe all the linux distros are, I haven't tried them yet) but recently it has been lagging very unnecessarily (where even windows doesn't, and its supposed to be bloated) so does ubuntu need some kind of update or is this only happening to me? Because this has never happened before.

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3

u/aieidotch 1d ago

htop? is it swapping because memory leak? it is fine after a reboot again?

2

u/Pure_University_780 1d ago

check your system monitor when it starts lagging, i bet something's eating your cpu or ram. could be a runaway process or snap refreshing in the background.

also what version are you on? they pushed a kernel update last week on 24.04 that messed with some amd gpu drivers, rolling it back fixed it for a bunch of people

1

u/GrandmaColin 1d ago

I just built a PC right when that happened so was still setting everything up, I got so concerned my hardware was messed up after a few days of using it because it couldn't tell what was wrong.

2

u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 23h ago

We don't know what hardware you have and which version we have.

2

u/Ok-386 22h ago

There's a ton of potential culprits. You should check journalctl and dmesg.

One pretty common issue is bad WiFi drivers or bad WiFi firmware. It works most of the time, but will occasionally get stuck in some weird state after failing to properly recover from a power-saving mode.

You can quickly test this if you have access to a wired internet connection. Stop WiFi, unload the module, and see if the problem can be replicated. Or simply reboot to BIOS and disable Wifi. Disabling Wifi in GNOME settings and rebooting might also work, so try that first if you don't file like booting into BIOS. 

Things like this don't cause many issues in X11 sessions, or even on KDE on Wayland. But GNOME on Wayland is very sensitive to kernel stalls or anything that's continuously spamming kernel logs (in this case, it would be the driver because the firmware isn't responding. Note that this doesn't mean WiFi has stopped working).

1

u/haz3lnut 9h ago

What apps? Are you talking about tabs in Nautilus? Firefox? Chrome? Some other app?

And always check htop or system monitor for what's using up your CPU.

How much RAM is on the system?