help improving GUI performance on the following system
 

hello, i built a small Debian testing system for a friend on the following hardware:

AMD 1000+
512M ram
IDE 40G WD drive
onboard vid shared 32M memory

Linux sisfront 2.6.16-2-686 #1 Sat Jul 15 21:59:21 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

(not sure if that is the problem or not, but when i built the system it unamed as a i686 so i put the 686 kernel for the upgrade when i went from stable to testing respositories.)

the GUI is KDE 3.5 and is patheticly slow. we are talking 3 - 10 seconds for most actions to happen. i know KDE is bloated and slower then most GUIs that are thinner and cleaner, but we both really like the KDE look/feel.

i have a computer at the house running roughly the same specs (amd 1200+ with 1G ram and nvidia GFx 5200 128M) but still the lag on this thing is not good enough to make it worth running KDE or any full GUI on in linux. no were near the lag under XP Pro with this rig.

so how do i improve the performance on this computer, without hardware upgrades, and still be able to keep KDE?

what info do you need about the MB and vid card, and how do i get that info for you. what other info do you need and how would i get it for you.

thanks for the help.

just to add it is not a dma issue as when i run hdparm /dev/hda the result is on.

so still looking for help with improving performance in the GUI, the CLI is blazing fast. much faster then i would expect for this old of a computer.

Post hdparm /dev/hda so we can see all the options, but I believe hdparm -d /dev/hda will actually show your dma status

ok, ill get him to do that tomorrow. i am at the house now.

thanks.

How about the output of 'glxgears | grep direct' and what size swap do you use?

Sorry for the delay here is the result of hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 16383/255/63, sectors = 78242976, start = 0

and hdparm -d /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
using_dma = 1 (on)

i have a 700 mhz laptop, 200MB RAM that ran KDE 3.5 better than Win XP but not as good as fluxbox, i actually thought it was quite responsive, and i had taskbar transparency and a few other bits, and was using firefox.

Your system should piss all over it. Your 2 machines are nowhere near the same spec, look at the Vid card specs, 32M to your 128MB, that looks to be the choke point on the system.

With 512megs of RAM and a fast processor like that, there's no reason why KDE3.5 should be sluggish. (For comparison, one of my workstations is a 564mhz Pentium 3.)

I suspect the video driver. What sort of video chipset does it have, and what driver is being used? Hardware acceleration shouldn't be a significant issue. Using the plain vanilla "vesa" driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf should result in perfectly acceptable performance.

hummm, funny.

u do have swap space right?

I have heard of badly configured video cards slowing systems down, so it might just be a case of the right drivers...

I have a laptop with 512 memory, and a 1.5 intell processor. I run kde 3.5 MUCH faster than windows. however, I do use Ubuntu (debian based, but not quite the same)

The i686 kernel might be a problem with your AMD processor. Try using the normal kernel, or the k7 kernel.

see this link for info on the different kernels- http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=85917

i think the problem is that you have the wrong kernel, however i have no experiance in this matter

Or maybe the hard drive is bottle necking, try running 'hdparm -tT /dev/hda' to benchmark the transfer speeds. Could be an older drive...

Urm... You going to post this?

for hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 400 MB in 2.00 seconds = 199.91 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 130 MB in 3.04 seconds = 42.80 MB/sec


tried running glxinfo | grep direct and get Command not found. Sorry i am a newbie when it comes to linux. Trying to learn.

Hmm, the buffered read speed seems fine (current top of the line IDE drives go at around 60mb/s). The cached reads is _way_ off though. For example, on my work computer I am getting 2083mb/sec. So it might indeed be a hard drive bottleneck.
Not sure if you want to start fooling around with hdparm and tuning some of the other options besides DMA. It might not even be a software level problem, it could just be misconfigured hardware, because as I said the cached reads are way off.

just try You do have the mesa (DRI) packages installed, correct?

yes i installed the mesa package for him. without it he would not have glxgears.