The other day I was playing arround and really wondering why my red hat was soooo slow, so I started to disable and kill off some processes that I didnt need. Anyways I got through about 10 of them with no performance increase, then I hit [eth0]. Well I did a little 'sudo /etc/init.d/network stop' and tried the usual test of starting OpenOffice1.1, I had a performance increase of almost 5 fold. Usually, with networking enabled, OpenOffice1.1 takes anywhere from 15 to 40 seconds to load on my 1.5ghz, but now i was up with an editor in less than 3 seconds.
I rebooted my box so everything was back to the way it was before I started killing processes. OpenOffice took the same 30 seconds to start, but later on, only 3 seconds with networking disabled. I rebooted again, after disableing networking at startup, and the first time I started OpenOffice it took 5 seconds.
Does anybody know why I get this performance boost when networking is disabled (and yes it is over all applications, not just Office).
My box is Red Hat 9 with the standard kernel, Athlon XP 1800+, 256mb ram and GeForce 2 64mb.
I have heard that there is a performance improvement when one has a 2.4.22 custom kernel, is this to say the kernel shipped with red hat 9 is dodgey, or is it just not enhanced for an Athlon?
Thanks heaps.

Probably DNS.. Check /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts Make sure 127.0.0.1 is in /etc/hosts and the DNS server in /etc/resolv.conf is correct. Bring up a shell and try "host www.yahoo.com" and some similar tests like that. If you're connected to the internet this should resolve in a very few seconds.

Might be something to do with "network" essentially activating all of the networking interfaces at boot time?