Hi,

I'm new to this forum.
I also have little experience with Linux.

Recently I installed SUSE 9.3 to my computer.
It looks very attractive but unfortunately it runs far too slow.
To start KDE, It takes minutes.
The most unpleasant experience within SUSE 9.3 is to run
OpenOffice.

I really appreciate if anybody would suggest a way to accelerate
SuSe 9.3.

WS

Dear, "wushan", SuSE 9.3 is reasonably Fast Distro. However, i can tell you something which can improve the all over speed of your computer system while running on SuSE 9.3 Pro.

Uninstall all those applications which are not needed, since by default so many applications which are not required by every user installed into the system.

You can use " YaST" for it. Open Yast, go to => Software, => Install/Remove Software.

Second, in the YaST again, go to => System , => System Services. and Disable all the services which you suppose you don't need.

well, KDE is bundled with a lot of applications, so it runs slow as comparetively to GNOME. if you not addict using KDE then try GNOME. It is faster and precise.

My information may be less but Hopefully ,it can definately improve the speed of your system.

Last thing, YOU DID NOT MENTION THE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION OF YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM which is the primary factor which set the speed of the system. any way........


Pentium IV 2.4 Mhz or Above or AMD 32/64 BIT Athlon 3000+

512 MB DDR RAM or Above

865 Motherboard

80 GB HDD

are minimum hardware requirements to get SuSE 9.3 Pro working faster.

Please extend your momory if you are on lower. if it is sufficient then ignore hardwares and reply

There may be some thing wrong somewhere else.

Regards.

Welcome to LQ!
What are your system specs? e.g.: cpu speed, amout of RAM. If your PC is below the minimum, then that would explain why SUSE runs slow, you may also want to try what Be.Gurmeet.Be said.

Thanks. Be.Gurmeet.Be & ctkroeker.

The spcificatios of my PC reads:
P4 2.66Mhz, 915 Motherboard, 256 Mb RAM, and 80 Gb HDD.
So I think there would be no hardware limitation in running SUSE 9.3.

I have tried to disable some daemons that are apparantly useless and
indeed got some speed-up, though not significant. But I'm not sure which
of the survices are compulsory to keep the system working.

I appreciate your further instructions.

WS

The reason for the slow boot, is that linux doesnt offer parallel booting. I have heard it was possible to tweak Linux to enable such a thing, but it was just a rumour.. anyone know more on the subject?

Dear " wushan " , i am agree with " elliotfuller " to some extent , but Tweaking of Every OS does make satisfactory impact on it's performace to some extent.

Any way........

If you are not sure about making off/on Services ,then leave it

However i have an another suggestion for you which i think is ulimately the best solution for your problem.

I learnt that a couple of weeks ago rate of RAMS Chips slashed down to half of it's last price GLOBALLY.

Upgrade your Computer with one more 256 or 513 MB RAM Module ,

After reading the Specifications of your computer, i found your computer needs only one 256 or above RAM Module, nothing else.

If you can afford it then go for 512 MB because your Processor and motherboard is highly fast , so correspondigly your RAM is not that sufficent.

Any other Information ....

Regards.

SuSE 9.3 by default is set to load services in parallel when booting. Have a look in your suseconfig.

Hmm, thats what I have heard was the reason for a slow boot in Linux.. IF that is not the cause, what is it that makes Linux such a slow booter?

Well I think despite any tweaking to properly boot a linux distro is going to take some time although others will certainly disagree. Unless you remember each and every change you made to speed the process of booting you may run into problems in the future. Linux based distros are made to run with out restart for long periods of time it is simple as that.

Your systems specs seem more than enough to run Suse 9.3 at a fairly snappy pace even with the apparent ram disparity. Slow is subjective but if it seems really slow I am thinking that in fact you have a problem with your install. I dont think the starter of the thread mentioned anything about a slow boot process but in case they did I think it is worth saying most linux distros werent made to run in fashion where we turn our computers right off at night and turn them on when we need them.

By the way I run Suse 9.3 on an old P3 667 oc'ed to 710 (146 fsb) with 256 megs of sdram disks running on raid 0 and it still runs pretty well.

I guess there are some good tweaking guides out there while were on the subject of possibly tweaking kde anybody care to post some links.

I have a laptop, and SuSe doesnt work for suspend to disk with it. Therefore I have to constantly shut down my computer to save batteries, etc.. I think many people make excuses for Linux when they explain the slow boot. I think it is something Linux needs to improve upon if it really wants to put real competition in with Microsoft. In the server world, they are definitely winning, but for everyday users they are really hurting. There package management system is poor, slow booting, etc. I think that people need to stop making excuses for Linux and accept that it is somthing we need to work on. FreeBSD is looking like a great alternative to Linux right now (Better Package management and Security) If I didn't have a laptop I am pretty sure that I would run it. No more excuses, lets accept and improve.

Hello friends

i think, unfortunately the low speed is a native problem in Suse.
I used many times with suse 9.1& 9.2 & 9.3 with many of its components ( bundled software and additional software) and on different hardwares' power, but all of them has a low speed in comparison with other linuxes such as fedora and debian. Specially KDE and its components has lower speed factor, but some other famous one such as gimp , openoffice , or small softwares such as xawtv and xine has lower speed than others.
And about memory on the system, i my tests it has a low increase by adding memory to system and even you use 2GByte on system its speed still apparently lower that others.
And about the installed ( and not running) softwares on the system it has no effect on the speed of OS in many OSes.
Many peoples that i spoke with them about this matter have ideas like me, all of them are working daily with at least 3 distributions in their job and home.

Any article about the difference of linux distributions in daily working speed will be appreciated.

Thanks

Has anyone tried one of the specially-compiled kernels?

I am now a 9.3 user but was formally an 8.2 user. When I installed 8.2 SuSE selected a special "athlon" kernel for me, but it isn't doing that for my 9.3, although I think there may be one available. In fact it just gives me generic "i386" kernel, not even 586 or 686.

I'd also be interested to know if anyone's experimented with recompiling the kernel with different .config options and how that influenced boot time and performance in general.
I find this slow startup process frustrating as well.

About the memory upgrade: When I've booted and logged on to my SuSE9.3 box, started KDE, kopete, suse watcher, karamba etc. I'm using approx: 110Mb of RAM. The rest of my 521Mb is used by Linux for disk cache. I've been using my computer for the past 1 1/2 years running desktop Linux, surfing, word processing, media viewing, gaming etc. etc. , and I have -never- had any use of the 1Gig swap I've allocated.

So, I don't think that an upgrade from 256 to 512 Mb RAM would to a lot of difference as long as the box is used as a "regular" desktop computer.

Early attemps to get efficient parallel boot process were quite flawed, check out gentoo forum and read about new initng. It is possible that SuSE will implement initng if (and when) it will be considered stable. This is not that simple.

KDE takes up most of the load time for me. Maybe try and start it in command-line mode (I don't know what all you can do from there, but it should start pretty fast there).

On a side note, maybe someone should make a pure command-line version of KDE or something, so you just have to type in somehting and it will start the graphic end of the program in question, and reduce load time, maybe significantly.