Bloated Distros?
 

I've heard the distro I use is one of the most bloated ones out there(Redhat9), how true and how serious is this? does it warrent a possible switch to a different distro(i'm open to the idea).

I'm also wondering if this is normal:
When browsing around in what's supposed to be a fast browser(Firebird) when I browse to a new page my mouse will glitch and I have the resource monitor thingy running in the system tray next to the clock and I see the CPU demand go WAY up(to maximum) for about 1-2 seconds while rendering a new webpage, this didn't happen at all in WinXP(browsing was one of the least resource eating things you could do...), is this normal or is my distro unusually bloated or did I bloat/slow it down somehow by maybe installing programs/libs from RPM instead of optimized src?

There are a lot of questions mixed in there, I'm just generally trying to get a feel for if I should start over for peak speed(I have a problem with needing everything to be tweaked and at maximum speed/usability)

NOTE: I'm to much of a newb to use flux/black/icewm or anything other than gnome/kde. :)

newb here too. :) and you can't be too much of a newbie for flux, install is a breeze through apt-get.

i ran redhat 9 for about 4 days and wan't too happy with it.....there seemed to be way more things than I needed, not to mention there were a lot of glitches in it for me at least. I switched over to jamd linux and am fine now. it was especially funny when i found out that the creator of jamd calls it redhat-lite ;). but anyway, if the bloat doesn't bother you, stick with redhat.......or try something smaller.

but anywho, sorry I can't answer your other question :)

trinity

thanks for mentioning jamd, a friend is installing it as i type this actually, i may give it a try.

The problem with flux isn't the install, it was pretty easy, just took some reading and config editing that was all very easy to do. The problem is the leap from it being completely unusable to me being as fast as i am right now in KDE. In KDE I can zoom around clicking icons i've made and it's quite fast, I need a 'K' menu and flux rips all of that away from me, IceWM was probably the most usable default install i've seen but even it was empty to start :( ....such a newb...

lol, don't feel bad. i'm finding it really hard to get used to the right-click menus of flux too.....I'm an icon person and trying to adjust is hard, but it is a cleaner desktop and faster too, so I figure it will just take some time on my part to learn it. the ironic part being that I'm typing this in KDE :P , so yeah. i'm a little 'fraid of flux.

hope your friend has success with jamd, it is a really nice little underrated distro. :)

trinity

I run an almost full Mandrake 9.1 install, and just tried reloading a page in Konqueror, scrolling etc, keeping an eye on the cpu usage. It never gets past 20% no matter what I do (KDE 3.1 etc). What are your system specs?

1.2 athlon
512mb SDRAM
If you want anymore detail than that i'll reply quickly with it.
I would really love to get rid of this problem.

I have another question regarding bloat. I don't know how exactly Linux works so I'm not sure of the best ways to unbloat a 'newbie' install. When I installed Redhat I pretty much just installed everything(well over 2 gigs) because I wasn't sure what anything did and wanted to make sure I got the best of everything, that's easily understandable. Now that I know what most things do I want to get rid of things I never use.
If I were to prune the package list of almost 70% of what's installed now would it speed up Redhat?


EDIT: wow this is weird, i just played quake3 at 1124x768 full graphics and CPU was at max the whole time, but it wasn't glitching at all, it was completely smooth. Yet rendering pages in any browser causes my mouse to glitch? ugh.

I hate the terms "bloated" distros - if you do a manual install of RH you can tell it exactly what to install and not to install, so there will be no "bloat".

I mean, I can say that Slack is bloated, as it by default runs the NFS daemon and all the networking stuff even tho my machine has no NIC...but its just the way I installed it.

My RHs are properly configured and running as fast as anything else.

Try a few different browsers - Konqueror, Opera are 2 I use and neither produces the effects you are describing.

ahhh, now how the heck does Firebird eat up more CPU than Konq? :confused: lol

How would I go about removing packages that I installed before I knew exactly what they were? I've tried using the package manager while running RH, it comes up with dependancy errors when REMOVING packages...
I've put CD1 in my drive and rebooted, entered setup and tried to do it from there(that's the only way i was able to install packages), it won't let me remove, only install.

So from what I can tell the only way for me to remove the hundreds of excess packages I have is to uninstall each one individually/manually.

I'm still in the stage of just using Linux for fun even though I use it exclusively now, so I have no qualms about formatting and re-installing. Perhaps J.a.m.d distro would be what I'm looking for, trinity?

thats not exactly true, a while back i buggered up glibc on an LFS and so needed to compile another, i didnt have a copy of my static directory(i do now, lol) at the time so i needed another distro with a compiler, i happened to have some red hat cd's think it was 7.2 not sure. anyway when i did the install i told it not to install X cos i didnt need it. it didnt install X, however it did install a load of gtk and gnome-libs which i was quite confused about since i thought X would be a dependancy for them. so in a way it could be considered bloated but i guess most ppl doing a redhat install want X so they wouldnt notice this.

For my understanding, the slowing down is not with the extra packages, but with those background services not needed. Try running to disable those services. You might get a performance boost.

I have a similar CPU usage problem, and while it doesn't get in my way, it just plain bugs me. Just hitting the Forward and Back buttons to bounce between two simple, no-graphic pages momentarily peaks CPU usage to 100%. Even just a page-down peaks around 50%. If I just move the mouse pointer around really fast, it gets up towards 50%.

I'm running RH9 on a 1.8GHz with 256MB RAM. It's not swapping. Idle CPU usage is 0%, memory is about 45% used, 15% buffers and 40% cached, according to KTimeMon. I'm running Mozilla 1.2.1 with three windows open

I've looked through some of the kernel parameters for memory usage (because it's a hog: RSS=33M) but don't see anything obvious. Any ideas why this is happening?

Basically, I'd think so. Extra packages might slow down the 'find' command or something that goes pawing through your hard drive but, otherwise, it's basically just dead space on the drive. Then again, finding those commands on the disk and loading them from a bloated disk might slow down launch times a fraction. Still, most measures of performance depend on what's actually *running* in RAM and how the programs are compiled, rather than how many of them there are and how much HD space you have. Yet again, though, it's still annoying to have thousands of files you never touch.

for flux install Idesk, or XtDesktop, maybe Rox File manager or emelFM file manager.

pz