I5 6300U (2c 2T) with 16GB RAM - Would I notice a big performance increase in upgrading CPU?

General Discussion
1

I use the aforementioned CPU in my laptop. I recently upgraded to 16GB, knowing that it would allow me to run more qubes at once but that it may or may not increase system performance in general and make it snappier (it does not). I will test Qubes on a more powerful machine that I have to see if Qubes runs faster on a faster CPU, which I suspect that it will, but I just wonder if Qubes itself is slow no matter the CPU. For example, it takes about 20 seconds for my offline vault, which is 103MiB, from the moment I start it to the moment KeepassXC opens. If I’m going to be using Qubes as my daily driver, that’s not acceptable.

I tested youtube and local videos and the performance is absolutely awful. Youtube videos have low frame rates, even lower frame rates in full screen, and local videos stutter horribly. 4k videos are practically unplayable.

As I mentioned, I will test the performance on my more powerful PC, but I doubt it will make a huge difference. On an optimal system, I would expect Qubes to start up VMs within 5 seconds, and local/youtube videos to play flawlessly at max frame rates. P.S. I use the default video app for videos but used VLC as well, no difference.

2

Your start up time requirement might be met with an NVMe SSD running on PCIe 3.0x4.

Qubes relies heavily on a fast SSD, so try upgrade from SATA SSDs to NVMe SSDs.

Also there is some discussion on how to tune your SSD for ~1s improvement. Like 4kn SSD and 4kn template.

Regarding your video issue, that might be to blame the decoder in your template. Generally debian template has a better compatibility with videos.

3

Also, I’m experiencing significant VM boot time cost on memory ballooning ( balancing ). Disabling memory balancing has the effect that debian-11-minimal boot time, on average, improved from 5.5s to 3.36s.

Edit:
Even with that 3.36s boot time, from clicking on the menu to seeing firefox window takes around 7.4s. So to have it less than 5s is really difficult.

4

I see, I didn’t realize the drive would have such an impact. I’m using a Samsung SATA SSD on my laptop, but the one on my PC is NVMe.

5

For me it’s perfectly acceptable:

  1. Twenty seconds versus security I’m getting with Qubes isn’t question at all
  2. So, I’m changing my computer using habits and I’m keeping KeePass always open, which means - 20 seconds per boot.
6

Good for you. I’m not happy with 20 seconds at all.

I installed Qubes on a better machine and I have to say it’s pretty nice. Much snappier. However, it still struggles with 4k video. Other than that I’m very happy. It takes about 5-7 seconds to boot up my vault now which is within acceptable range. I will buy a faster drive for even more performance. However, I have concluded that Qubes doesn’t just require 16GB but a very good CPU + very good NVMe SSD. The fact that I can’t play 4k videos smoothly demonstrates that.

7

I’m wondering if buying a discrete GPU, attaching it to your multimedia Qube, and playing video only with that Qube would help.

Qubes OS does’t rely on GPU to do decoding, so you may need a extremely fast CPU.

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