cristian wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a Pentium 200 with 64M of ram, RedHat6.0 and KDE 1.1.1.
> Everything is running slower than Win95.
>
KDE is a memory hog. 64M are just a lower bound IMO. With 128M it works
quite well and does not access the HD to log in.
> The time from power-on to desktop is shorter in Win95.
You can change that by creating your own init scripts. Or at least
delete the symlinks in /etc/init.d/rc?.d for services you do not need.
Things will speed up tremendously if you write the init scripts by hand.
But the best way to avoid the long wait on boot is to not boot: I run my
box 24/7 and can log in instantaneously.
> Programmes like StarOffice, Netscape, Wordperfect8 are loading in longer
> time in Linux. It looks like in Linux all the program is loaded from HDD
> in the memory and in Win95 are loaded only the pieces you use (I can
> hear the noise made by the HDD).
>
Actually, it's the other way round: Linux loads only the parts of the
program that get accessed by code actually being executed. That is
called demand-loading and I don't think win9{5,8} has it. IMO that's the
reason that Linux is slower in loading _huge_, statically linked
binaries: Win just load the entire binary into memory, which will be
done at maximum HD speed, given the binary is continuous on disk. All
code will be in RAM, so executing the startup-code will be done in
minimum time.
Linux OTOH will only load some pages (4k each) into memory, exec them,
then load others as the demand becomes visible. With those huge memory
hogs that OOP results in, that jump around in the binary during start-up
to initialize any class, whereas a classically programmed binary would
more or less linearly exec it's startup-code, Linux eventually end up
loading a 4k page just to exec some bytes of code, then load the next,
eventually loading most of the binary, but in small chunks. The only
thing that reduces this overhead considerably is speculative pre-fetch
(read_ahead) of sectors from disk (done by Linux as well as the disk
itself), so most page accesses will hit the disk cache.
OTOH the Linux way is much faster when it comes to small binaries that
have linear starup-code and maybe even only a small footprint of exec'ed
code in the binary.
> I monitorized my memory and it is enough, a very little amount of swap
> is used.
>
Linux will swap out programs not currently used in favor of more space
for buffer cache entries. getty's for the virtual terminals you probably
never use (tty2..tty6) are good examples of such.
> When I installed RedHat I chosed "everything".
> By slower than Win95 I mean only twice slower.
> I tried also Slackware and Mandrake.
>
> Maybe I should change the distribution ? (it was something about
> Turbolinux on the list)
>
Debian comes to mind. i can assure you from personal experience that it
starts up window manager some three/four times faster than SuSE
(although probably not KDE).
> Maybe KDE is the problem ? Don't advice me to give up KDE. I like nice
> shows (I have beautyfull backgrounds about 1.5M , mountain landscapes,
> sunsets , I change them according to the season). I noticed that all KDE
> applications are very fast (kmail, kppp), but everything alien is slow.
>
Once the program is loaded, it is fast of course. The startup-code is
what matters. And as KDE is a typical example of high-memory-usage, OOP
application with a (probably) _very_ non-linear initialization-code, my
advise for you (if you don't want to give up KDE) is: Buy another 64M of
RAM. Prices have dropped to a lower level again.
> Maybe the way linux is configured must be changed ?
>
If you want to poke around your init scripts...
Marc
--
Marc Mutz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marc.mutz.com/
University of Bielefeld, Dep. of Mathematics / Dep. of Physics
PGP-keyID's: 0xd46ce9ab (RSA), 0x7ae55b9e (DSS/DH)
