Problem Description:
My system is running very slowly and I frequently get “PROCESS X” is stalled (?) Force Quit or Wait errors
I suspect my Swap partition might be too small.
I have 8Gbs of Ram but my Swap partition is only showing as 1.3Gb
~$ swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 1.3G 0B -2
But when I boot from a USB to the Trial version and run Gparted I do not see any partitions labelled SWAP nor of that size, 1..3Gb
That’s not a swap partition, it’s a swap file. They are usually preferred these days over swap partitions because they are more flexible. If you search the web for “linux change swap size” you’ll find many step by step explanations like for example https://www.baeldung.com/linux/increase-swap-space .
Edit: I see that file is basically not being used (fourth column, 0 Bytes). So unless this is a screenshot made just after booting with the system not having been under any serious load yet, I think the size of the swap file might not be the problem.
Note that Ubuntu defaults to using a swapfile since 22.04, swap partitions do not really make sense anymore (their big advantage was/is only on rotary discs where you can position it in a place between two partitions that are regularly in use in your system, so that the HDD head can actually swap while moving between them, this could speed up swap access significantly. In times where most of us use NVME or other non-mechanical harddisks using a swapfile and leaving the access management to the controller/OS is way more effective)
I agree with @rubi1200 , adding up the percentages of used memory in your screenshot shows firefox using more than 51 % of the used memory. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources has some tips on how to find the things that use too much memory (might be extensions, might be themes, might be a high number of tabs, … ). It also tells you to use an adblocker (Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin are explicitly mentioned) and possibly NoScript (I do use it, but you have to be able to live with a rather high annoyance factor; most sites you visit for the first time will not render correctly until you permit the scripts on that page to run).
I don’t think I leave an unusual number of tabs open.
i currently have….18 open in Firefox.
and I don’t usually use anything that keeps playing audio or video.
but Chromium also bogs down.
However I will try working without using Firefox and see if things improve.
Given that you’re using a modern browser, your memory use seems reasonable for what you’re doing.
Looking at your hard disk, it seems that you have a spinning disk, not an SSD. Is that correct?
Ubuntu is targeted at modern machines, and with just 8GB RAM on a spinning disk, it can be slow.
For your system, I would have recommended a lighter distribution such as Xubuntu or Lubuntu. They are both official flavours of Ubuntu and therefor fully supported, so it might be worth considering this.
You can install Xubuntu or Lubuntu on your machine without having to reinstall from scratch. If you issue this command, it will give you the option of using the Xubuntu desktop whenever you log in:
sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
Likewise, this command for the Lubuntu desktop:
sudo apt install lubuntu-desktop
Have a look at the Xubuntu and Lubuntu websites to see if either of them looks good to you.
Caveat: Although these commands are usually very reliable, they can on rare occasions cause a problem. If you decide to go ahead, please run all updates first, do a full backup, restart your computer, install whichever desktop you want to use, and restart again.
Please check if similar issues have already been reported and resolved.