Adjust the virtual memory

General Help
1

Hello:
I wanted to recover an old laptop with 2gb ram, installing Zorin Os Lite on it. According to the requirements that are posted on the page there should be no problems, however, it starts to get slow.
In a section of the internet they recommended changing the virtual memory.
Could you tell me how to do it?
Thank you very much.

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2

I should warn you, though... Swap space can help prevent long delays and freezing, but will not necessarily substitute RAM curing slowness in general.
This is because Swap will not be used until RAM is utterly full and needs to dump. Then and only then will Swap be used - result, the slowness remains because swap is not used until after the thing that causes slowness.

Upgrading your RAM if possible, is your best bet.

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3

I have been running Zorin Lite on HP mini netbook with 1,5GHz Atom CPU + 2GB RAM without any speed issue. It is a plain vanilla installation without any tweaking. What is the spec of your laptop? Can you tell me the make/model?

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4

I also ran Z15.3 Core on 2.25GB RAM until recently, so should be possible.

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5

Toshiba Satellite L20-155 DDR2-SDRAM 38,1 cm (15") 1024 x 768
Pixeles Intel® Celeron® M 0,5 GB 60 GB AMD Radeon Xpress
200M Windows XP Home Edition.
Obviously, given how old Windows XP is, the idea was to recover it with Zorin Os Lite.

6

The CPU is 32bit without any doubt.
One way to accelerate those old laptops is to replace HDD with SSD. I forgot to mention in my previous posting but I replaced the original HDD with inexpensive 120GB SSD (less than 40 Euro). It did certainly speed up the whole thing.

[edit]
Considering the age of this laptop, HDD might not be SATA but IDE. If that is the case, there is no possibility of upgrade. IDE connect SSD is (almost) non existent.

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7

I thought swappiness was set to 60%. We had to set vm_swappiness to 10 so it only started swapping out when the free memory was down to 10%.

vi /etc/sysctl.conf

and add

vm.swappiness=10

Run this for it to take effect.

sysctl -p

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8

I forgot about swappiness... Primarily because it never made any difference how much I changed it back when I was still on the notebook with low RAM :stuck_out_tongue:

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9

We had an old Red Hat 5 server at work that had 40% free memory but had swapped out 20gb to swap. We altered swappines to 10 and to started using the memory we had given it and less swapping in and out.

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10

I managed to find this page back:

While it is written for Mint, it should be applicable to any Ubuntu based OS.

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11

Well, the correction helps a lot. Hopefully the O.P. has better luck with swappiness.

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12

I had to diable swap sudo swapoff -a before i started.

sudo swapon --show
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=20 status=progress #20gb of swap
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile && sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab && sudo swapon --show
13

You are Probably talking about a notebook PC, Lite was made for such low spec PC's and Surely, It will give your PC a great boost. But, Changing any hardware or virtual specs is technically a waste of time. Because those PC's are technically made for general use not much more :man_shrugging: !

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