How to troubleshoot disk performance issues

General Discussion
1

I recently got my hands on a Dell XPS 15 9560. I have been using it for about a month now, and although general performance hasn’t been on par, for reasons still unclear to me, at least compared to my old Dell Latitude E6520 which has significantly less resources, yesterday things really just came to a crawl.

Since the machine is roughly 10 years old, i suspect memory or the SSD could be the cause, but i do not know how to test this on Qubes.

Can someone please recommend a way for me to test these two components?

Everything is dog slow, even just scrolling on a page, if i drag the slider or scroll the mouse wheel, there is quite a delay in it actually happening, to the point where the machine is generally just not useable. Spinning up a DVM has gone from 15 seconds to 65 seconds. Which of course tends to let me think the SSD is failing, but i would like to try and have some degree of certainty before i spend money on a new SSD, only to install it and still have the same performance issues.

I do plan on upgrading both memory, from the current 32 to 64 GB, and the SSD, just a better SSD than the Toshiba the machine shipped with, but if my underlying issues are neither of the two it will all be in vain.

2

For memory use memtest86+

For disk it depends.
If you want to test the speed there is Benchmark test in Disks app.
If you want test it’s cells then run live os and run full smart test or full disk test in live gparted (or fsck under same live os as smart).

PS: did you set VM’s scheduler weights?

3

I have seen and experienced such slowness on my very old T430.
And the root cause was: the accumulated dust inside :slight_smile:
After a disassemble and cleanup of the inside, the issue where gone.

If you have the same issue, the signs would be the increased temperature and a heavily downscaled CPU - you should chek those first.