[TriLUG] Debian 10 (Buster) on Brand-New OptiPlex 3070 Installer is Glacial

[Brantley West via TriLUG]

I think I remember encountering these symptoms and changing from graphical
to text-based installation or vice versa to speed up the process. Hope that
helps.

-bw

On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 12:57 PM Brian via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> On 8/23/19 9:03 PM, David Both via TriLUG wrote:
>  > Seems like a pretty low end box for "some VirtualBox VMs." That i3-9100
>  > CPU is 4 cores with no hyperthreading and a max of only 16GB of RAM.
>
> It beats a single-threaded 10-year-old machine.  And in reality, it's
> only running one VM which serves as our build environment for production
> releases.  Not a heavy-use situation.  We're only changing it at all
> because the original hardware has become unreliable.
>
>  > The cuplrit is more likely to be the network
>
> It's definitely not the network (but for the record, it's a Realtek
> 88something gigabit chipset).  This problem is consistent from the
> moment the installation image boots, long before any network activity is
> involved.
>
> On 8/24/19 8:58 AM, Alan Porter via TriLUG wrote:
> >
> >>  From the grub prompt, if I choose the graphical installation option,
> it's minutes before the GUI appears.
> >
> > This one line makes me suspect the USB stick.  Is it plugged into the
> same USB hub as some other USB 1.0 decide that has downgraded the whole bus
> to slower keyboard/mouse-like speeds?  That can make the USB storage access
> very slow.
>
> Though this is the most likely culprit so far, I still doubt that it's
> the issue.
>
> It took over 30 minutes (I am not at all kidding) for parted to get from
> "scanning disks" to a usable interface.  That has nothing to do with
> networking and probably isn't due to slow USB either (by that time, the
> executable should be fully in RAM).  It took another several minutes to
> get from partitioning to the next interactive screen of the installer.
>
> On 8/23/19 10:19 PM, Wes Garrison via TriLUG wrote:
>  > Finally, it could be some sort of power supply issue or thermal
>  > throttling.  Check the PSU and CPU fans and heat sinks.  Make sure
> the fans
>  > spin freely when you spin them with a pen, and make sure the CPU heat
> sink
>  > is properly seated and making good contact with the CPU.
>
> I would really hope that Dell wouldn't ship systems with problems like
> these.  If it's still glacial when it gets to running the installed OS,
> I'll look for thermal problems.
>
> Anyway..
>
> When I left the machine yesterday evening, it was grinding its way
> toward prompting me to select packages for installation.  On Monday,
> assuming it's still waiting for me, I'll finish out the installation,
> however long it takes, and see how the installed OS performs.
>
> Thanks for the input so far!
> -Brian
> --
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-- 
-bw