I have been using Ubuntu since Hardy Heron (8.04). I used Natty, Oneiric with Unity. But When I recently (more than 1 month now) upgraded My Ubuntu to Precise (12.04), the performance of my laptop is not satisfactory. It is too unresponsive compared to older releases.
For example, the Unity in 12.04 is very unresponsive. Sometimes, it requires 2 seconds to show up the dash (which was not the case with Natty, though people always saying that Natty's version of Unity is buggiest). I am assuming that, May be my 1GB RAM now becomes too low to run Unity of Precise. But I also think, Since Unity is improved in Precise,
It may not be the case. So, I am not sure.
Do you have any ideas? Will upgrading RAM fix it? How much I need if upgrade is required?
Laptop model: "Lenovo 3000 Y410"
Graphic : "Intel GMA X3100" on Intel 965GM Chipset.
RAM/Memory : "1 GB DDR2" (1 slot empty).
Swap space : 1.1GB
Resolution: 1280×800 widescreen
Shared RAM for Graphics: 256 MB as below output suggests
$ dmesg | grep AGP [ 0.825548] agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xd0000000
Best Answer
I'd say 1GB is low, considering that you have 256MB of that dedicated to the integrated Intel graphics!!
What I mean is that, with 12.04 Unity, if you will be doing a decent amount of multitasking, you will start to notice lags with 1GB. Eg Firefox open with 5+ tabs along with 3-4 other programs running in the background, etc. (This is based on my own extensive experience with a 1GB machine).
A stock i386 install of 12.04 desktop with Unity 3D uses about 550-600MB of RAM after boot for me, excluding caches and with near-zero swap usage.
So I believe that an additional 1GB of RAM will almost certainly solve your problem. However, since RAM prices are at historical lows (should also be in Bangladesh), if you can afford it I suggest you "max out" with a 2GB module and future-proof your computer :)
Temporarily, if you do not game, I recommend reducing the integrated graphics share to 128MB. This shouldnt affect the user interface/Unity in any way.