My Experiance with Laptops is that they are always slower then comparable
desktops, generally the hard disks are slower, the ram runs slower, the PIII
notebooks may even be having some weird issue with linux and speedstep,
anything that can be done to make it use less power or generate less heat is
generally done in notebook manufacture.
particularly hard disks, only the new generation of disks are catching
up.... most still run 4300 rpm drives...
and as stated many times in this thread, the hard disks are the bootle neck
of a system...
guess we wait until the powers that be make some suggestions...
regards
..
Franki
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of David E. Fox
Sent: Friday, 25 May 2001 12:38 PM
To: Ric Tibbetts
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [newbie] OT: Intel Performance
> Wow, some great comments!
> Thanks to everyone who has replied to this.
Ric - I've cc'ed your message to my brother, who runs Win 98 on a
PIII/600. Maybe it'll be a good comparison point, but his system is
a desktop, not a laptop (and I'm not clear why laptops should run it
slower ... but it's a lower power CPU, isn't it? All other things aside,
should there be any reason why a laptop PIII isn't the same thing as a
desktop PIII? My gut feeling would be "of course not", but that doesn't
explain your (relatively) poor performance.
> runing on an SMP system is faster only because you run more than one
> instance...). I'd not seen a large difference, until I fired it up on
> this PIII (and a few others around here).
>
> So, having said that. A brief comparison:
>
> The SMP PII 266.
> Running Linux (Redhat 6.2).
> Disks:
> integrated SCSI Fast Wide/Ultra. (adaptec).
> Memory
> 128 MB
>
> Average Processing speed: 8 hours per cpu (2 instances running)
>
> PII 400 UP
> Disks
> IDE, whatever I had handy to throw in it.
> Memory
> 256 MB
> Operating systems:
> Win2k, Win98, Linux (Mandrake 8.0), and Solaris 8.0 (busy box...)
> Average processing speed: 8 hours (regardless of OS. I only see minor
> variations is processing speed between the different OSs. The fastest
> being Linux & Solaris).
>
> The PIII 650 Laptop UP
> Disks:
> Whatever Dell threw in it at the factory (IDE)
> Memory:
> 128 MB
>
> Operating System:
> Win98
> Average processing speed (I checked this): 72-80 hours.
>
> I only have it ruinning as the screen saver on the laptop, but it's in
> that mode 16 hours a day, and all week-end. That's not a reason for the
> slow performance. It's doing NOTHING else at that point. I've also
Yeah, and based on my brother's timings on setiathome, it's getting
"enough" CPU while just in screensaver mode, I would think. Incidentally,]
his average times are about 19 hrs per work unit, and mine are close to
10 hrs per work unit (but normally two other cpu-intensive things run
as well -- dnetc & genomeathome. My load average hovers around 3.0.)
> I reflected on this, only because I was seeing people reporting slow
> performance with KDE (among other things) with PIII systems, and it
> sparked a note with me. Could be a problem with the PIII's, or there is
> code in the newer Linux that "some" PIII's just don't process well.
The only thing I can think of (and which I partially addressed in another
message to the list) is that there's a possibility that the extra memory
usage incurred with KDE is impairing setiathome's ability to stay 100%
in the RAM and/or cache memory. Remember, setiathome is a 'niced' process,
so it runs at lower CPU than other tasks by default. Of course, if some
other task starts paging in RAM there rests the possibility that part of
setiathome might get swapped out. Ordinarily, of course, only systems with
*really* limited memory would be adversely affected, because the memory
footprint that setiathome needs is only about 15 megs. KDE of course uses
a large amount of RAM, much of it shared between a literal 'forest' of
separately running processes (do a 'ps alx' on your system and you'll see
what I mean) :). And with the recent reports of X hogging up vast amounts
of RAM, hell, anything can be happening :(. But on a system with ca. 128
megs of RAM this shouldn't make that big of a difference. I have 256 megs
of RAM now, and my previous P-100 system had 96 megs.
There's another possibility, and that depends on whether you are using
setiathome's server stats page to tell you what your average is, and whether
that laptop is 100% connected to the internet. If setiathome is done with
a work unit and the internet link is not up, it'll just sit there and wait
until the connection becomes available. On a dialup or other connection,
you could be doing nothing for a long time :(. Both my brother and I have
DSL so the system can put up and grab work units without having to wait
hours for a link to come up.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
[EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns
[EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
