i m new to linux.uptill now i had worked only with window.but now decided to take advantage of free o.s. but since i installed linux 7.2 redhat -i386 on my 400mhz 20 gb hdd machine my machine performance is so degraded.i suffer from following problems[list=1][*]screen not refreshing imediately.its looks like machine is hang when i open two three windows one by one.[*]when i open new window it takes too much time to disply on screen[*]during brosing net i often get messeges like javascript not support and thread is died unexpetedly.how to overcome it[*]sftp is not working properly,takes too much time to copy 1kb file from one machine to another on network. [/list=1]

so can anybody pl. give me tips to improve performance of my machine interms of speed.
with hope
thanks in advance

Since you didn't post the full specs of your box/apps/window manager I'll try and keep it to general things.

1) RAM. More memory is better. This goes for every OS. And it ain't expensive these days.

2) Disable services/daemons you don't need. If you don't need RPC type services close off portmap etc. If you ain't a mailhost, shut off sendmail, itll come on to deliver mail to elsewhere itself, etc, etc.

3) Some people claim an increase in HD speed when using hdparm to enable 32bit transfers, DMA, etc ,etc.(man hdparm for more)

4) Red Hat installs a few Window Managers that are really nice(?) to see and work with, but generate a lot of overkill. If you don't really need annoying theme sounds, popups, automounters etc, etc you can either disable it, or switch to a Window Manager which is less CPU/memory intensive like IceWM or Blackbox.

5) Make sure your X server matches you Graphics card.

6) Some people can gain (network card) performance increase from customizing IRQ priorities witn irqtune (man irqtune).

7) There's a kind of "TweakUI" like app for Red Hat, I haven't tried it, but it's either in the powertools cd or else at rpmfind.com or freshmeat.net

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I had similar problems with my SuSE when I had no swap partitions. (I had 64 Megs of RAM and I thought it was sufficient for anything. It was not enough for a simple browsing...)
This problem ceased as soon as I created the swap partition (although I do not know if that is a must in Red Hat, too).

post the specs of your machine (or atleast the graphics card) then we could you more help.



also what window manager/browser you use.



kde is a bit of a hooner when it comes to managing windows. and mozilla is that greatest hoon of a browser taking bloody ages to do anything on any machine (unless you have a Athlon 1800XP machine with a gig of ram, that might make it run alright )

try using another window maker (there's thousands out there which whiz along) and as for browsers try opera. its pretty light on the system. or konqueror, that is pretty nippy sometimes (though ive noticed it takes a while to get going sometimes).

Alex

P.S. if you have a nvidia card (from the riva tnt upwards) then head over to www.nvidia.com to get their drivers for their cards. they make X pelt along

i also have 64 mb RAM. so how u partitioned swap memory.? In memory information shown in control panel
total physical memory is seen 64 mb
(outof which free remains only 4 mb)
total swap memory is seen 514 mb
outof which free remains above 475 mb)

is this means swapping partition is not done properly?

it is usual for linuz to use most of your RAM. It will free some RAM up when it is needed by a program.

The swap partition is already there and working (a bit big but that won't affect speed i don't think).


Alex

Not much help here but may give you an indication.

I have a PII 450 Used to have 64mb ram. I found that using Linux with the KDE it responds at less than half the speed of Windows 98.

I upgraded to 192 ram just to feed Linux and now its at about 1/2 to 2/3 the speed of what Windows 98 is.

I also noticed that if you use something like Mozilla it can be a real pig after a while with several Moz windows open as also Moz takes about 10 to 15 seconds to start up from a fresh logon. In general Mozilla is pretty jerky anyway.

Not long ago I also tried Riserfs which is meant to be faster for smaller file sizes but on my box ext3 seems faster. Not by much but it feels like it.

The extra RAM really helps. I found that out. Also, running black box really speeds it up. I would also try Mandrake rather than Red Hat. Mandrake expands upon Red Hat and gives better performance.

i m using sis6326 graphic card and KDE as window manager and Konqueror as browser.

One - get more RAM, linux loves ram.
Two - If that sis chip is intergrated with your m/b then it will be using shared ram, after you get some more go into the BIOS and increase the amount of memory that is allocated to the video subsystem.

i m not getting you? how to go in to BIOS.? pl. tell me more clearly and without using so much technical word as some words i may no know.

When you have a motherboard with intergrated video, it uses some of the system ram to do the video stuff that a seperate video card with its own ram would do, in almost all intergrated boards there is an option in the bios to increase the amount of system ram that is dedicated to the onboard video. When you boot the computer and it's doing the memory check there should be a message at the bottom of the screen that says something like - Press "Del" to enter bios/setup, press that and have a look around.