hi everyone!

i'm new to freebsd... i've installed 5.4.
everything went well with system config. - the different devices etc.
BUT i just cant get the same speed as with linux on application start up... example:
on a fresh (after revoot) machine i start xmms. on linux this takes about 5 seconds while on freebsd it takes 20-30 seconds
everytime i need to load program afresh this happenes and during that time the comp. crawls

it just works much more slowly

any ideas?

i really want to make my home pc a freebsd-only, so that i don't confine myself to linux only. but with this speed problem i'll hardly ever do

***PS: the machine is OLD INDEED - 333MHz 128RAM, nevertheless it work faster on linux

That machine is faster than 2/3's of my machines, and I have no issue with FreeBSD being slow. More hardware information please.

Sorry for not providing this info initialy

Celeron 333MHz
128 RAM
HDD - Maxtor 20GB (ad0: 19541MB <Maxtor 2B020H1/WAH21PB0> [39703/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33)
SiS 5513 UDMA33 controller
on board VGA SiS
NIC: RealTek 8139
sound card: Yamaha OPL-SA on

btw i'm using KDE

i could post any additional details (dmesg, kernel config)... ok?

128MB RAM is really on the low end. My experience though is that BSD handles low RAM machines better than Linux, but perhaps not in your case? What does "top" have to say about RAM utilization in each OS?

top's output, with kde 3.3 loaded on linux and kde3.4 loaded on freebsd with both running kosnole and konqueror file manager, my guess now is that is not just hard drive lag.

on linux

Tasks: 39 total, 1 running, 38 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.0% user, 1.6% system, 0.0% nice, 96.4% idle
Mem: 126488k total, 117968k used, 8520k free, 20344k buffers
Swap: 128516k total, 8k used, 128508k free, 58668k cached



on freebsd

50 processes: 2 running, 48 sleeping
CPU states: 16.7% user, 0.0% nice, 9.3% system, 1.2% interrupt, 72.9% idle
Mem: 69M Active, 11M Inact, 30M Wired, 4892K Cache, 22M Buf, 1708K Free
Swap: 231M Total, 27M Used, 204M Free, 11% Inuse


More timings... may call them irrelevant, but anyway

on linux KDE3.3 loads from kdm password promt to ready-to-work in 25 seconds
on freebsd (KDE3.4) same process takes well over 2 minutes!

FINALLY KInfoCenter memory page does NOT show Disk Cache, just Disk Buffer, unlike linux where there are both. Nor does it display Shared memory...
For both Disk Cache and Shared Memory reads "Not available" on freebsd
And on linux Application Data is about 40% of all Physical mem....whereas on freebsd it's about 80%
why are these not available in freebsd?

it is kernel misconfiguration,
sorry for bothering you guys

when i get back home i'll find the problem lines in kernel config. file and i'll post the result.
i hate to say it but it will turn out something stupid

Here is what happened. After a couple of times recompiling the kernel... the problem didn't disappear. Then i tried my last guess... the kernel sound system.

When i disabled it in loader.conf the system ran faster...again my "test" results:
with kernel sound loaded KDE needs > 2 min to start
without sound loaded KDE is ready in 50 sec.

could it be a kernel sound system problem specific to my machine, or it originates in KDE's artsd?

PS: when sound is enabled my sound card is properly detected and works fine.

finally: artsd is to blame!

with KDE sound system OFF (no artsd) the system works as fast as linux does.
luckily i can go without it (artsd)

what about DMA, it is activated on BSD?

maybe #hdparm /dev/hdX could give you some output?