Fixing slow mouse with Raspberry PI OS

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Last Updated on 6th February 2022 by peppe8o

One common problem with Raspberry PI OS is mouse speed. This problem isn’t linked to OS by itself, but appears to be more related to some mouse hardware. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to fix slow/lagging mouse cursor.

Mouse Poll Rate

Raspberry PI OS exchanges position and click data with mouse with a pre-defined constant frequency named polling rate.

Raspberry PI 4 model B 8GB

Polling Rate is measured in Hertz (Hz) and measures how many times in a second data are transmitted from mouse to operating system. It is set with a system variable named “usbhid.mousepoll”. Common values are following (first line “=0” means “=zero”):

usbhid.mousepoll=0 -> use interval requested by the device
usbhid.mousepoll=1 -> 1000Hz
usbhid.mousepoll=2 -> 500Hz
usbhid.mousepoll=4 -> 250Hz
usbhid.mousepoll=8 -> 125Hz
usbhid.mousepoll=10 -> 100Hz (Default)

If you experience a very slow mouse movement, then you can try by changing this value.

Changing Mouse Poll Rate

This operation can be done directly from Raspberry PI active and running.

usbhid.mousepoll parameter can be set from cmdline.txt file. This file is structured to configure a list of basic system settings in one single line, each parameter being separated with a space.

From terminal, edit cmdline.txt file available from boot folder:

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

Go to end of line, append a space and then “usbhid.mousepoll=0”.

Save and exit. Then reboot Raspberry PI OS. Your slow mouse should be fixed after reboot.

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