Compare to other linux distro, fedora runs freaking slow.....
 

why RH linux run so slow?

When i move a window, it leaves trail...

i can always hear my CPU fan spinning (i am using laptop)

it eat at least 260MB of ram while other distro only eat 230 or something....

RH's linuxs are so bloated...i think RH dev should tweak the so to run faster...

everyone has different hardware, i have heard some people say core 4 is quite fast, maybe it just doesn't play well with what you have.

I've been using RH8, RH9, FC2 and FC3 - all of them have been noticeably slow, much slower than Win98 or Win2000.

yeah, FC4 seems a little slow also (as compared to Windows XP on the same hardware). However, XP crashed multiple times and eventually would not boot at all - hence my install of Linux.

I originally installed Debian Sarge, which seemed to be about the same as FC4 in terms of speed.

all that said, I do have a fair amount of graphical stuff running (stuff that XP simply does not have) - I'm sure it would be much faster if I trimmed it down.

XP is the actually most "snappy" OS around - it's been optimised for responsiveness, much more so than OS X or Linux.

Fedora may be slightly slower than some other distributions on older hardware due to the demands of security features such SELinux. It shouldn't use 260Mb RAM unless you have multiple applications going, though. The best option for the OP is probably to use System Monitor to find where the memory is going, as command-line utilities like top may not give accurate results with graphical applications.

I am also running a bunch of server software, that has to eat up some CPU. I'm sure the workstation version of FC4 is snappier, but maybe still slower than XP.

The "workstation" and "server" installation options actually just affect which software packages are installed. It's worth running System Monitor or the 'top' utility to get a feel for how Linux runs - you'll notice that your CPU does almost nothing most of the time, but Linux has lots of processes going on to support the graphical desktop all chewing memory, and much more of it than the server processes do. Once you are past the break even-point where Linux has enough memory it will use some of the excess to cache, which makes the system feel more responsive. My workstation is quite old, but with 768MB RAM Fedora whizzes even with VMWare and a bunch of network services. In contrast I have a laptop with 128MB RAM which struggles once you load more than a couple of applications.

yeah, I figured the graphical stuff made more of an impact, but I thought the other services were worth mentioning.

I understand when things are not working quite right on your own system, but I think your situation should be researched to see what the issues are causing the problem. My experience is the same as the following review:

"The most noticeable improvement when you boot-up FC4 is how much faster the process is. It took only 55 seconds to get from the GRUB boot menu to the graphical login screen, compared to a minute 40 seconds in Fedora Core 3. GNOME’s startup time was a mere 16 seconds, down from 27 seconds in FC3. I found most applications to be more responsive, startup times for OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird have improved quite a bit."

-- Technetra Review of Fedora Core 4

Full Review:
http://www.technetra.com/writings/re...ora_core4_html

If you are running a lot of services you don't need you can get a speedup by stopping the services you don't use. FC is usually compiled to a lower level processor than say mandrake or a gentoo. This will affect the speed also as it does not use those later processor instructions that allow the later processor to run code faster.