After upgrading from Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04, everything started to slow down in a way that I had not noticed when I upgraded from 16.04… Even Start-up and Shutting down are relatively slow ; we have not reached the catatonic state of Windows yet but this is worrisome. I saw other users complaining online. Any tips on how to correct it ? I will confess that I have WineHQ 3.0 installed but it did not seem to slow down the system with Ubuntu 17.10 so is the problem Wayland ? Any ideas on how to optimize Ubuntu 18.04.1 ?..
I run 18.04 on a Dell XPS 13 and Lenovo E440 and I haven’t experienced any sluggishness. I was on 16.04 and 17.10 before on the Lenovo and have not noticed any significant change. Out of curiosity, what Gnome plugins are you running?
hi eveyone,
i agree with Dimitri, plus, my teak thing has already 3 !!!
so, i don’t add either extensions nor themes; besides github let know the situation is
not ‘stable’ yet, and the beaver itsef does not seem very enthousiastic either.
i am a little disapointed since i thought the strategy to abandon unity was to give gtk
the most to ‘user friends’…
the best
manuel
Your system specifications are good. 8 GB of RAM and core i5 (even if it’s 4th generation) should be able to run things smoothly.
I don’t have concrete proof to back my claim, but in my past experience, upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu is not always the smoothest experience.
If it’s possible, make a backup of your documents and go for a fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04.1 and see if works fine or not?
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I am not aware of installing any Gnome plugin per say, but then again, it’s possible I carried stuff over from before the upgrade, I know I had to remove some gnome panel that was helpful with 16.04. But I am not sure what remains of my experiments…
I’ll try a fresh install when I can… it will clean things up. Thanks
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You’re welcome 
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I am still on Xubuntu 16.04 and need to upgrade to version 18 in a couple of months but I always choose a fresh installation, to avoid problems.
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Last week I did an update from Ubuntu 16.4 to 18.4 on my laptop Dell, since then my mousepad is not working properly and have trouble with pushing buttons. I also had a few frozen Ubuntu’s. Then i did a new installation of Mint 19 which works perfectly.
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Just for info, still had some floppy disks, removing them increased the startup speed quite a bit. I have no problem with speed while using Unity only.
Hi,
In the past weeks I upgraded 3 machines from 16.04 to 18.04, and I cannot tell that the machines (2 Laptops and 1 server), that the machines are slower than they were before. what I experienced is that LVM +LUKS gave major problems on the machines that have 2 disks or more, so upgrading them made a mess out of it, and I had to reinstall from scratch. But that is not a problem is there is a good Backup strategy. The laptop with one disk upgraded smoothly.
Another thing I experienced is that gnome extansions ate up mu GPU, but after removing them everything went back to normal.
Furthermore my server, since running 18.04 uses more swap space. I did not find out what is the cause of this (just didn’t have time). But it does not seem to be significantly slower.
18.04 … I did a upgrade with major crashes then a fresh install - still more issues. After a week of trying to fix little things I moved to Kubuntu. Its been very different but its faster overall. I probably should have stayed with 16.04 and I have on all my work computers. My home & work computer are both 18.04 Ku. Im hoping future updates to Gnome help with the problems.
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I have also upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 and am currently running 18.04.01. I have not experienced slow down. It may be due to the fact that my /, /boot, /etc are on a SSD.
However as suggested by Mr. “Abhishek” try 18.04.01 and keep it as pure as possible.
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Anything distro 16,04, 16.10 is smaller and faster; all the new distros keep getting FAT just like windows…Maybe the question is why update just for the fact of having the latest and greatest. The only thing new thats really fast and NEW is Neverware chromebook (Linux Kernel), and that really flies, but has some limitations untill the new Google Android apps (or linux apps) get added sometime this year. Try Peppermint 7, 8, or 9 (Lighter Ubuntus), they fly !
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I am not glad to see that it’s indeed true, that it’s sluggish on some machines, but I am glad to see that I wasn’t the only one having this issue.
I have gone through a lot of reading, and testing, and tweaking, until I have gotten to a pretty good performance, I’d say.
Have a look at these tweaks, and I’m looking forward to your responses.
https://www.computershowto.pro/2018/09/09/how-to-speed-up-ubuntu-18/
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This is exactly the answer I was looking for ; thank you very much ! And I only followed your first suggestion:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=512M,rw,rw,relatime 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs size=512M,rw,rw,relatime 0 0
Yet Ubuntu life is good again ! This is working for me. I am even contemplating trying 1024M but I fear that if I monopolize too much RAM I might start loosing performance with excessive swapping…
Thanks again computershowtopro !
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I’m glad to see my post helped someone else, too.
If your machine has enough RAM, give it a 1024 to shm, and reduce swap pressure even further, in the sysctl.d/99-custom.conf, make it 80 cache, 20 swap, like
vm.swappiness=20
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=80
Does your machine have more then 4GB of RAM ? Then go for it 
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Do you recommend a separate home partition to allow for a fresh install of Ubuntu without the need to reinstall your personal files? ( Of course I backup all these files to a second hard drive daily just in case.)
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I always recommend root, swap and home partition. But reusing the home partition between Linux distribution doesn’t always work.
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I use 18.04.1 on a i5 with 6Gb RAM. I upgraded from 16.04 without a fresh install. I have not noticed any diminution of speed but I do get the occasional freeze and have to restart using the power button (which I do not like doing). The problem occurs when I leave the laptop unattended for 10 minutes or more, but problem is solved by closing the laptop lid which put the computer to sleep. I would be happy to find out the reason for this behaviour.
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