Red Hat 9 Slower Than Windows 98
 

I've noticed that sometimes things run noticably slower in Red Hat Linux 9 than Windows 98. I always thought that Red Hat would blow Windows away in the speed department, especially when I saw that the minimum requirements were a Pentium II.

Why the drag?

Do you have examples :Pengy:

Keep in mind, RedHat 9 (and Linux in general) is more advanced than windows98.

For example, it takes the computer around eight seconds to pull up the "Home" directory sometimes.

Moving to the RedHat Forum

If you aren't running great hardware, you might wanna try a lighter window manager.. Also, Linux's speed and stability are in the command line and in the kernel. So if you want to see that blazing speed, pull out a book, or check the link in my sig for Linux commands ;) You'll then see the 'speed' that linux is known for ;)

Cool

I think I should state my system specs for the record as well.

PIII 733Mhz
128 MB RAM
ATI Radeon 7200
40 GB Hard drive for Windows 98
20 GB Hard drive for Red Hat Linux 9

These are my observations: It does appear that Red Hat runs slower than Windows for some things.

This includes: Boot up, calling programs in a graphical interface, and opening up certain directories like "home"

I am under the impression that Red Hat just appears to run slower and that the underlying stuff is much more efficient. A quick glance at a top command will show you how the resources are being used.

I think that the X-Window server is the slowest thing about Linux.

If you have a slower older computer, you will notice this. However, what you also will notice is that the applications do not crash. The system doesn't crash or lock up. It is stable, and reliable. It also is FASTER doing the NON graphical stuff (AKA the command line....like INSTANT if you just watch it while doint stuff).

So what APPEARS slow as a SYSTEM are just the eye candy ON TOP of the sytem where the system itself is much more efficient.

OK..that said....if you add up the extra time it takes to call a program or two, or even open your home directory, and add all of the time re-booting Win98 and correcting lock-ups and closing frozen apps with the task manager, you might find Red Hat (even 9) faster in the long run.

What do people think? I notice the Graphical stuff is slower to even on my kick-butt machine (athlon XP 2600 1GIG PC 2700 SDRAM 7200RPM drives....but I NEVER have to reboot...of course, except when I'm working in Windows!

I have a p450 and I'm using fluxbox since it is very much lighter and it helps a lot with the speed. You can also check that your hard drive is in DMA mode ; you can do that using the hdparm command but I'm not exactly sure how it works.

This is the minimum for graphical operation. Get more RAM. Meanwhile,
disable as many services as possible. Disable as many graphical effects and eye candy as possible. Get a light-weight window manager like OpenBox, e.g. from http://www.fedora.us . Don't run big applications. Keep an eye on your memory usage, e.g. with xosview (or "free" if you know how to interpret its values correctly).

Yes. I had the same problem with RedHat 9.
My solution was to recompile the Kernel. It helped greatly.

These days, a home computer should have at least 256 MB of RAM.

GNOME and KDE are slow on older computers, and especially Nautilus (which is what displays your home directory) is slow on older systems. Try a lighter weight window manager like fluxbox or, if you want eye candy without too much overhead, WindowMaker. They are available especially for Red Hat on www.fedora.us, and you'll have the side benefit of having a program, apt-get or yum, that can keep your whole system up to date. (Even when up2date's certificate ran out :-) )