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Old 05-30-2004, 10:37 PM   #1
pyre
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Distribution: Redhat linux 9, Fedra Core 1, Gentoo, Debian (woody), Mandrake 9.2
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linux runs slow!


Okay, first off, im not knockin linux or saying MS is good...also, i DID search the forums but did not find an answer. I thought I saw it a long time ago, but not any more. okay, I like linux a lot, I use it as im trying to get good enough to completely scrap windows...however, I, as well as my windows using brother both have noticed it seems to run slow! I have used linux on a 900 MHz (pentium) computer with 512 Meg of ram, an AMD duron 1.8 GHz, with 256 meg of ram, an AMD athalon XP 2200+ with 768 meg of ram, and an athlon XP 2000+ with 512 meg of ram. If I type a command at the command line, ie. mozilla www.google.com, it seems to pause....theeeen go. It's only like a small lag but, all of these computers should have had a fast enough processor, and ample ram. It sucks because (UNFORTUNATLY) I like how windows will just pop a window up without really batting a lash. Every install ive also allocated swap memory. Neither my CPU nor my ram went extremely high. With each of the machines I tried RHL 8&9, slackware 9, mandrake. Also, I primarily use KDE. KDE is thick with graphics so on slack I even tried blackbox, window maker, and most of the other WM but still no great improvement. This can't be normal, maybe something is misconfigured or something? PLEASE help or give me a link, anything. Right now, I use Slack 9 (is 9.1 really worth getting for a semi-newbie?) and usually KDE 3.1. I use kernal 2.4.xx, I haven't really added much to this slackware install beyond what came because i still kinda suck with it. Sometimes I use window maker or black box but I dont want to have to. thanks for your time, sorry if this is a repeat post.
 
Old 05-30-2004, 10:53 PM   #2
John5788
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use light wms, fast filesystem like reiserfs, and prelink
 
Old 05-30-2004, 10:53 PM   #3
darthtux
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enter the command
Code:
ps aux
you probably have a lot of daemons running like httpd, named, etc. If you don't use them you'll want to turn them off.
 
Old 05-30-2004, 11:01 PM   #4
tmike
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Registered: May 2004
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Yes, completely true..

I have same problem, and was thinking to open same topic, but since you opened one, I'll just continue on it.

I have 2GHZ proc with 256 MB RAM, 80GB HDD, nvidia GeForce MX 4000 128MB. I am running slackware 9.1 with Gnome 2.4, and I am experiencing same kind of problem, everything is much slower than lets say on MS Windows XP Pro which I got with my machine, and left it on one partition. I talked few times with people about this problem, and for some reason, almost everyone kinda gets mad when I say that XP works much faster and smoother on same machine. Here is one example:

Mozilla firefox:
- on linux, it takes about 5-10 sec to open it up
- on XP, it takes 2 -3 sec max to open it up

But I know mozilla is kinda heavy software, so here are other examples that are bothering me for a long time:

gedit: 5-7 sec to open
kate: 8:15 sec
kedit: 15 sec minimum
xmms: 3-5 sec, sometimes longer
etc..

I checked if DMA is turned on HDD, and it is, I have latest version of XFree86 server, with latest nvidia drivers. I tried fluxbox and windowmaker, and believe it or not, not much difference, apps still load slow, some run even faster while I am in gnome.

I tried also Mandrake, Fedora, Lindows, knoppix, FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x, and situation is same, everything runs just not smooth and fast as lets say it runs on windows. Now I am not saying 'windows is better' or anything like that, I am just complaining about slow speeds that I am dealing with in linux.

I already mentioned that those window managers like fluxbox don't make much difference, but please, why should I be running some little - light manager on machine with 2 GHZ, while heavy XP can manage to be fast with all that fancy graphics and processes running in background?

Any ideas?

Last edited by tmike; 05-30-2004 at 11:02 PM.
 
Old 05-30-2004, 11:12 PM   #5
JonChristmas
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Distribution: REDHAT 9.0 FREEBSD 4.10, WinBlowsXP for its prettyness ;)
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its called hardening

Too answer your question as quickly as possible your running too many extra things. Hardening for those who dont know is where you take all the stuff you dont use or need and drop it. Imagine going into windows services and shutting a bunch of extra ones off it makes the boot go faster. Well sorta the same for linux since certain things are going on in the background. GO ahead and if your using red hat linux there should be a GUI way to decide what gets turned on at start up otherwise you need to edit the rc.d files to decide. Real simple stuff it doesnt always make things speed up a whole lot because I have noticed that Linux tends not to make use of all your RAM but just enough for each process. So if the Mozilla web browser tells it I require 64MB of ram for my section of memory then it wont go ahead and load a few extra files to have cached for later. I think that is I am not positive on that as I am no guru
 
Old 05-30-2004, 11:19 PM   #6
pyre
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thanks for all the replies! I tries ps aux, and this is the output:

sacred@paradox:~$ ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIM
E COMMAND
root 1 3.1 0.0 488 240 ? S 00:09 0:0
4 init [4]
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 00:09 0:0
0 [keventd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SWN 00:09 0:0
0 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 00:09 0:0
0 [kswapd]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 00:09 0:0
0 [bdflush]
root 6 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 00:09 0:0
0 [kupdated]
root 10 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW< 00:09 0:0
0 [mdrecoveryd]
root 11 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 00:09 0:0
0 [kjournald]
root 152 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 00:10 0:0
0 [khubd]
root 221 0.0 0.2 1404 536 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /sbin/dhcpcd -t 10 -d eth0
root 1086 0.0 0.2 1436 612 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/syslogd
root 1089 0.0 0.1 1376 460 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/klogd -c 3 -x
root 1092 0.0 0.2 1412 540 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/inetd
root 1095 0.1 0.5 3080 1416 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/sshd
root 1105 0.0 0.2 1496 556 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/crond -l10
daemon 1107 0.0 0.2 1504 644 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/atd -b 15 -l 1
root 1110 0.0 0.8 4848 2120 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 sendmail: accepting connections
smmsp 1113 0.0 0.7 4736 1956 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 sendmail: Queue runner@00:25:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue
root 1119 0.0 0.2 1428 540 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/mouse -t imps2
root 1121 0.0 0.1 1368 480 tty6 S 00:10 0:0
0 /sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux
root 1122 0.0 0.2 2516 660 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 /opt/kde/bin/kdm -nodaemon
root 1124 2.3 7.1 86956 18388 ? R 00:10 0:0
2 /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-WZsBIg
root 1125 0.0 0.4 2804 1232 ? S 00:10 0:0
0 -:0
sacred 1138 0.0 0.3 2048 968 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 /bin/sh /opt/kde/bin/startkde
sacred 1177 0.1 3.5 20392 9124 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: Running...
sacred 1180 0.2 3.5 20072 9192 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: dcopserver --nosid
sacred 1183 0.2 3.9 22048 10128 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: klauncher
sacred 1185 0.8 4.6 21484 11852 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: kded
sacred 1198 2.5 2.2 9928 5836 ? R 00:11 0:0
0 /opt/kde/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 60 -m artsmessage -l 3
sacred 1200 0.9 5.5 26756 14312 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: knotify
sacred 1201 0.0 0.1 1364 320 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kwrapper ksmserver
sacred 1203 0.8 4.4 21184 11388 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: ksmserver
sacred 1204 3.8 5.1 22992 13272 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: kwin -session 117f00000100010839833540000001661000
sacred 1207 0.9 4.7 21708 12240 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: kwrited
sacred 1209 3.8 5.5 24192 14140 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: kdesktop
sacred 1212 4.2 5.6 25404 14564 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: kicker
sacred 1213 0.0 3.7 20636 9668 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: kio_file file /tmp/ksocket-sacred/klauncherK03Tha.
sacred 1216 3.0 4.9 22340 12572 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: klipper
sacred 1218 5.0 5.6 26104 14600 ? S 00:11 0:0
0 kdeinit: konsole -session 117f00000100010841520140000001506
sacred 1220 2.8 4.9 22076 12552 ? S 00:11 0:0 0 korgac --miniicon korganizer
sacred 1221 2.4 4.3 21036 11040 ? S 00:11 0:0 0 kalarmd --login
sacred 1222 0.2 0.5 2292 1300 pts/1 S 00:11 0:0 0 -bash
sacred 1225 0.5 0.5 2300 1304 pts/2 S 00:11 0:0 0 -bash
sacred 1240 0.0 0.5 2292 1296 pts/3 S 00:11 0:0 0 -bash
sacred 1258 0.0 0.3 2772 824 pts/1 R 00:11 0:0 0 ps aux

now it seems like a lot is running, as was suggested but windows can have up to like 35 processes going so im not sure what is considered a lot. i dont want to shut off services blindly because i have reinstalled slackware sooo many times bc if i do something, i can rarely fix it. should i recompile the kernel as well? (2.4 or upgrade to 2.6) I have a guide either from here or tldp that was for newbies. should i do both, just one, etc? all suggestions are GREATLY appreciated! thanks again.
EDIT: ps: not to sound like a smart ass, what is lighter than window maker? I figured my computers are ample for kde (even without added effects, karamba, etc). also, why on a semi-descent computer would it lag simply vc of the wm, is linux gearing toward "state-of-the-art" nowadays? hope not!

Last edited by pyre; 05-30-2004 at 11:22 PM.
 
Old 05-31-2004, 06:08 AM   #7
chii-chan
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Regarding mozilla, the latest version (i'm using the nightly build) loads faster. Also I've noticed that Fedora Core 2 feels faster than Redhat 8.0 and Fedora Core 1. Maybe the kernel version (Fedora 2 with kernel 2.6 while the other examples uses kernel 2.4) plays some role.
 
Old 06-03-2004, 08:29 PM   #8
pyre
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Im running slackware 8, not fedora, but again thanks for the reply. I want to EVENTUALLY run a private server but right now, linux is TOO slow, does anyone else have any ideas? what should i shutoff? any help is greatly appreciated. as always...thanks!
 
Old 06-03-2004, 09:34 PM   #9
mint567
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Location: Georgia
Distribution: Slackware 10.2
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If you upgrade to kernel 2.6.x it does speed up Xwindows a lot. It is very noticeable atleast for me. I've become used to the way linux allocates ram and runs programs. Only downside I have is games.. if it wasnt for games I would not have winxp dualboot.
 
Old 06-03-2004, 09:54 PM   #10
darthtux
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If you don't use sshd or sendmail turn them off. It seems most of your memory is going for KDE and its apps. However, I can run what you do on a 500MZ 196MB machine with no problems. My apps open quick execpt, of course, OpenOffice.org.
 
Old 06-03-2004, 10:39 PM   #11
lyceum
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have you compiled your own kernel, or are you using a precompiled one? if you haven't, then i suggest compiling one. you can specify exactly what you need to be included, and nothing that you don't. and as your kernel resides in memory at all times, the more streamlined you can make it, the more memory you have for those graphic apps which are so memory hungry. i have seen noticeable speedups in my system after upgrading/recompiling a custom kernel for this particular system. just an idea.
 
  


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