Performance, am I the only one.
 

Folks,

I am a bit frustrated with the slow response of my linux machine.

I am running FC2 (2.6.8 ..) on a Celeron 2.6GHz (128k Cache)- 256Meg DRAM, new 7200 RPM HD.
I like to use KDE but am very frustrated.
It appears that if I start any application, it takes 10's of seconds to start.
Netbeans takes ~2 minutes to start.
Switching between windows is slow ... 1+ second.
Wake up after I have been away from desk for more than 1 hour is really sucky .. almost
10+ seocnds for all menu's and windows to respnd normally.

Keyboard/Mouse is sluggish to dead most of the times if I start a new app.

Hate to say this, but my win2k appears light years ahead in terms of responsiveness. Most days when I am using linux, I feel like I am back in the1200 baud modem speed with my compuater.

Gnome appeard faster, but I do like KDE interface

Another nsaty thing is that Mozilla goes to la-la land for number of seconds if you click on
something "wrong" on a page.
x

These aren't the only issues, I seem evolution taking about 1+ minute to start .. almost all GUIs are slow, only thing that seems responsive is termnal window and bash !!!


So my question is .. am I the only one or others have similar performance issues.
If others do, then I will be tempted to start using the bug reporting in various pacakges to document the problems ..

First, 256MB is not much to be running KDE on. Try something lighter, like Fluxbox or OpenBox.
Second, do this command (as root) and post the output:
cat /proc/mtrr

memory ?
 

reg00: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size= 256MB: write-back, count=1
reg01: base=0x0e000000 ( 224MB), size= 32MB: uncachable, count=1
reg02: base=0xe8000000 (3712MB), size= 64MB: write-combining, count=1
reg03: base=0xf0000000 (3840MB), size= 32MB: write-combining, count=1

KDE and GNOME eat a nice 200 MB of RAM on there own. There extremaly bloated and sluggish. You should REALLY try a lightwieght window manager such as fluxbox.

heh im starting to think it might be the recent kernel releases i hear more and more about memory problems

Sorry, I am not sure about the memory issue ..

I did check the memory usage with Gnome it wa less than 150Meg .. and things were running better .. but not pefrect.

The issue with Firefox going south was always there.

Yes system was to be close to 200 Meg and almost 440 Meg SWAP.
Killed and restarted Firefox and things are normal .. 90Meg Physical and 20 Meg SWAP.

Systme is still a dog when starting anothe app.

So it's not that you need 512 Meg RAM .. that's not right .. it's something else IMHO

I second that. I love KDE but can't stand it when running it on a slow, RAM-lacking machine.

I was using RH8 w/ KDE on a P3-500MHz machine w/ 256 MB RAM... it was painfully slow. :(

Redhat = Slow in general
256 mb is way more then enough to be running kde

i ran kde on a system that has only 48 mb of ram and a 150mhz processor <-- kde 3.2 mind you
yes it was kinda slow here but nothing like your describeing.

What im thinking is your video card is not using accelleration. Or mabye its the hundreds of useless processes that redhat starts up :P


Linux out of a box like a distro is painfully bloated in my experiance not even microsoft can rival the size of redhat or mandrake in full instal 7 gb is just going to far guys :)

but that said you can help the slowshit of some things by just removing damons and other crap that your just not using. I even have hacked slackware down to about 500mb with a window manager and most of the usefull librarys and compilers. <<<<WARNING YOU WILL FALL INTO DEPENDANCY HELL OR MISSING LIBRARY HELL IF YOU DO THIS AND THEN DECIDE YOU WANT GNOME OR SOMETHING>>> I know this from personal experiance :D

But anyway most distros are made with generalistic compile flags in them so they work on diffrent platforms. If you want to truly lightening fast operating system in linux you need to do a LFS or a Gentoo stage 1 install with gcc optimization flags.


Proud owner of a LFS 5.0 system :)

Personally, I cannot stand KDE, but my girlfriend loves it.

On a computer I now use as a server (Pentium 2, 233MHz; ~288MB RAM), running the KDE that ships with Slackware 9.1 (kdebase-3.1.4-i486-1), there were only minimal lackings in the performance. Given, after she ran startx, it was almost a minute-and-a-half before she was greeted with the KDE desktop--after that, though, it was 'smooth sailing.' This was with a 2MB, AGP 1x video card.

When I ran startx, I had my EvilWM desktop within seconds and never had a single performance problem. Firefox took a few (~5) seconds to start every time, though, but that should be expected. ;)

Perhaps your distro runs applications at boot that aren't necessary and eat RAM.
The first time you run KDE, doesn't it present you with some sort of application to set up which effects to use? (Sorry, I've barely used KDE, so I may be thinking of something else.) Maybe you could go back and disable some of the unnecessary effects for some minor performance ups?

Well folks .. thanks for the suggestions.

I did look around and can't find the devious daemons gobbling up my free memory

my main them was the observation is that my W2K seems more responsive .. so to folks out there
do you believe your linux machine is "as fast or better" than windows (2k/xp etc.) .. ?
just an objective observations is all I am looking for.

thanks

One thing you should be looking at is the output
of
hdparm /dev/hda
and
hdparm -tT /dev/hda

If you post the results here we can givr you more
feedback. Personally I think that that hardware should
be running KDE well enough, and if the 10 seconds
for an app aren't referring to OpenOffice (which is
indeed a bit chubby) there's got to be something wrong
with the setup ...

I'd also like to see your output of free and top -b -n 1


Cheers,
Tink

I haven't ever used Win XP, nor do I intend ever to do so. (Posts elsewhere detail why.) But my humble Linux installation runs so much faster than Win 98 did that there's hardly any comparison. Some things get done so fast I didn't think they were done--but they were. Almost all applications load in five seconds or less, sometimes a split second. Granted, I don't use KDE. I use IceWM and I have 384 Mb of RAM and swap file set to about twice that amount; but the swap file only seems to get used one or twice a day, if at all, to judge from gkrellm.

Have you checked to see the number of processes running? As somebody said, maybe a bunch of unnecessary processes are being run by default.

Or maybe it's one, ultimately simple but so far hidden, little flaw in the setup that's doing it. Properly set up, even with KDE, I'll bet your machine should perform far better than with any Windows version.

here i s ..

hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
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 = 234441648, start = 0
[root@localhost sbin]# /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 232 MB in 2.00 seconds = 115.96 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 30 MB in 3.05 seconds = 9.83 MB/sec


Again .. this seems important enough .. but is it really ?
.. I don't hear anyone saying "their machines run FASTER than windows"

BTW I just doubled my SDRAM .. to 512 Meg .. the startup time (after boot) for FireFox is still ~8 seconds .. in windows machine it's less than 1.
That's what's pissing me off.

Have you installed the appropriate modules for your graphics card?
You didn't compile your kernel, yourself, did you? Because it seems that DMA for your hd is not enabled.

Those two together can add up to some seriously retarded performance...

I agree with everything exvor said
i too am LFS user and have built it and used KDE without pain on an old 90Mhz Pentium pro.

Fedora couldn't be worse if by design......
everything is running at once....
there are a million configuration directories....
the kernel is compiled to be as slow as possible even has file system debugging turned on ! (roll eyes)

first thing to do is learn to compile your own kernel to support only your hardwaare and the things you need and hack it's makefile and change optimization flags for your system

then just start trimming down what's running to what you actually need/use