How to Improve Ubuntu Speed & Performance

System administrators are always looking for ways to make Ubuntu faster & improve overall performance. In this article, we will learn several ways to improve Ubuntu speed & performance. It is important to regularly perform these steps to optimize Ubuntu performance and avoid system slowdown.

How to Improve Ubuntu Speed & Performance

Here are the different ways to improve Ubuntu speed & performance.

1. Reboot Your System

This may seem like an obvious solution but you will be surprised to know many system administrators leave their system running for weeks and even months at a time. This can result in reduced disk space due to temporary files, and lower virtual memory due to running programs. Ubuntu is mostly used in server environments where you need to keep your system running. But it is always a best practice to restart your system at least once a week. If you have installed Ubuntu on a PC, then it is advisable to simply shutdown your PC when you are not using it. This will free up a lot of disk space & memory when you boot your system the next time, and make it faster.

2. Keep your system up-to-date

Ubuntu releases system updates from time to time, which improve performance, fix bottlenecks and use less resources to perform the same tasks. These updates even have bug fixes that cause performance issues and reduce efficiency. So you should update your system at least once a month to be up-to-date with all changes. Ubuntu makes minor updates regularly and releases major updates twice a year. You can update your Ubuntu with the following command.

$ sudo apt-get update

If you want to check whether a major update it available, run the following command.

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

If you see any prompts after running the above commands, enter Y to proceed further.

3. Monitor Startup Apps

Startup Apps are those tasks and processes that start running when your boot/reboot your system. Often we stop using a service or application but it starts running at system startup. This can unnecessarily waste your system resources. So you should regularly examine your startup processes and disable the ones you don’t need.

Here is the command to list all startup processes.

$ service --status-all

You can stop a service from running with the following command.

$ sudo service <name> stop

You can completely remove a service from your system using the following command.

$ sudo apt-get remove <program name>

4. Increase Swap Space

Swap Space is a reserved disk space used an extension of your RAM memory. When your RAM becomes full, Ubuntu will swap out some of the unused processes to this swap space on your disk, and swap them in only when they need to be used again. By default, Ubuntu reserves certain amount of disk space as swap space. You can easily increase swap space using GParted, its default disk manager. Here is our step by step tutorial to increase or create swap space using GParted.

5. Remove Old Files

Many Ubuntu operations require searching for a file or application on the disk. Now the more files you have on your system, the more time it will take for Ubuntu to find the required files & applications. So it is always good to keep only required files & applications on your system and delete the unnecessary files from your disk. One of the most common place for unused files it the downloads folder which contains all the files you have downloaded, even if you don’t use them anymore. You can safely remove them since you can always download them again if you need them. Here is the command to find and delete unused files from your disk. It won’t remove any applications.

$ sudo apt-get clean

If you want to remove unused packages and applications from your system, use the following command.

$ sudo apt-get autoremove

In this article, we have learnt some simple and effective ways to make Ubuntu faster.

Of course, there are other ways to improving Ubuntu performance such as upgrading RAM and using SSD hard disks, but these will cost you money. In this article, we have covered free ways to speed up your Ubuntu system that you can use regularly.

How to Improve Ubuntu Speed & Performance