On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 02:02:10PM +0200, Anders Thoresson wrote: > I've just taken my first stumbling steps down on the Linux road, > installing Redhat 7.3. Many things have impressed me so far, but the > over all speed of my system is a big dissappointment. Compared to when I > run Windows 95 and Windows 2000 on the same computer, almost everything > seems to take for ever. [...] > My computer is a PII-233, ATI Mach64 3D Rage IIC for video, 192 MB RAM > and 2 ATA33 hard drives. > > What's the bottleneck? Could anything besides plugging in more RAM be > done to boost the performance?
I've been watching this thread with interest. One of the reasons that I have enjoyed using Linux over the past few years, is that it seems to make better use of my "slow" hardware than any version of Windows that I've run. I have four computers: 486/66Mhz/16M, Pentium/120Mhz/32M, Pentium/125Mhz/40M, and Pentium MMX/200Mhz/128M. All but the 486 currently run Redhat 7.1, and I have been very pleased with the speed at which they operate. (I've run Redhat 6.2 on the 486, but it currently runs muLinux because it doesn't have a harddisk anymore--it boots muLinux from floppy disks and runs svnc, making a very cool X terminal. :) My P200 is used pretty heavily, too. It is a server for the others, and is typically running 100+ processes. There are often 2 or 3 people logged in, sometimes running 2-3 X sessions at a time. Unless I go to play xpilot, I can't tell there's anyone else logged in (that's due mostly to a slow video card). Even with that amount of usage, my swap is barely touched. However, I do _not_ run Gnome or KDE. I find them to be large and slow, leaving few resources for my applications. I have the libs installed, so I can run Gnome/KDE apps whenever I want, but I don't need or want the environment. As a matter of fact, if I had the newest fastest computer out there, I wouldn't run Gnome or KDE. If you want a fast window manager, and are used to the Windows look and feel, try IceWM (http://www.icewm.org). IceWM is small, fast, and really easy to use. (BTW, in RH6.2-7.1 IceWM was on the Powertools disc. I don't know about 7.3.) I've also used and enjoyed WindowMaker, but my current window manager of choice is fvwm2 + fvwm-themes. I also always boot into runlevel 3 instead of 5. Since I don't run Gnome or KDE, X doesn't take but a few seconds to start when I want to run it. > Clicking "New Message" in Evolution until the new message turns up > takes a couple of seconds. Starting OpenOffice 1.0 Writer somewhere > between 30 seconds and a minute. Recieving 500 mails or so from my ISP > somewhere between 15 och 30 minutes. I've never used Evolution (I prefer mutt) or OpenOffice, but the problem with fetching emails from your ISP seems strange to me. Many people seem to confuse the speed of their computer with the speed of their Internet connection. What type of connection do you have, and how are you downloading the messages? I receive an average of about 500-700 messages per day over a 28k phone line. However, I have fetchmail download the messages automatically every hour via cron so that I don't have so much to download at once. Depending on the type of mails you receive, 500 messages could easily add up to 1Mb--that would take about 15 minutes with my connection. For example: on August 9, I received 538 messages totalling 2,161,537 bytes. Had I downloaded them at once, it would have taken between 15 and 30 minutes. As someone else already pointed out, you may have a daemon eating up all of your CPU without you knowing it. If you boot your computer every day instead of leaving it up, there's a good possibility that updatedb is running. You can use 'top' to see what's running--by default, the most CPU-intensive process will be at the top of the list. I guess I've rambled on for long enough. If you need any help switching window managers, switching runlevels, configuring fetchmail, etc; let us know. :) Ben -- Ben Logan: ben at wblogan dot net OpenPGP Key KeyID: A1ADD1F0 -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
