I recently switched from Mandrake 9.2 to Debian Sarge and I have noticed that my machine is working a lot harder to do the same things it used to. My CPU usage will not go below 25% in X and my load average is around .52 when it used to be like .05 I'm running kernel 2.4.27-1-686 with the following hardware:

Pentium II 233
192 MB RAM
Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro 8MB

I have already switched to XFCE Desktop environment because Gnome and KDE were Slooooooooooow. This machine is primarily used as a file server so it is not utterly important that X perform well, however, I am curious as to why I'm taking such a performance hit here.

"I have already switched to XFCE Desktop environment because Gnome and KDE were Slooooooooooow."

You mean Gnome and KDE were fast on mandrake?

My PII 266/128MB RAM flies with icewm and a minimal install, are you trolling?

My pentium 200 has to run with fluxbox or twm or any other small x system. Though now i only run it through ssh. There is no way a pentium 266 can run KDE or gnome smoothly using any distro. I don't think there should be much difference between mandrake and kde (if you use the same KDE settings). Though mandrake might have automatically reduced KDE's visual effects. If you're gonna use the pentium 266 as a file server you should just use ssh, much more comfortable, my 2 cents.

"You mean Gnome and KDE were fast on mandrake?"

No-- not fast. I don't like KDE so I never used it. But Gnome was usable on Mandrake. Apps took a while to load and such, but it's what I expect from a PII-233. With Sarge though even XFCE takes minutes to load an app -- even calculator.

"If you're gonna use the pentium 266 as a file server you should just use ssh, much more comfortable, my 2 cents."

I said the machine is PRIMARILY used as a fileserver. I used to listen to music, surf/e-mail and sometimes type in OpenOffice -- but now it is too slow to do anything other than serve. I would like to be able to sit and use it when needed like I used to.

Is IceWM that much faster than XFCE?

Any suggestions to speed up my box are appreciated.

OpenOffice.org will crawl on that machine, regardless of window manager/desktop environment in use...

Regarding window manager, I recommend fluxbox. It is very lightweight and nice to use.

Fluxbox and IceWM are the fastest window managers. Window Maker takes a bit more resources but should still be usable. XFCE4 eats more resources than any of these three.

If you want Debian to be fast, use the new Sarge installer with reiserfs and 2.6 kernel. Install first just the base system, then x-window-system and a window manager and the applications that you need. Enable only the services that you really need. Don't forget to install apt-listbugs -- you don't want any buggy packages on a server system.

I have a laptop that's a 233/128 meg running Debian Unstable. I use XFCE on it, and it runs fine. Sure, some apps are pretty slow to load, but once they get there, they respond just fine. If I start oowriter or something heavy like that, I just fire it up, hit the bathroom or whatever, and it's there by the time I get back. A couple of days ago, I install KDE on it and it ran acceptably. I couldn't run fullscreen video across the LAN, but the other apps worked well enough. I've reverted it to XFCE though.

If you're using an older machine with some resource intensive apps, don't expect miracles. I'd highly recommend that you tailor the services so that you're not running anything unnecessary. A tightly configured custom kernel might be in order as well.

With regards on the Mandrake v Sarge issue with Gnome, I believe the version of Gnome that shipped with Mandrake 9.2 was at least a couple revisions back. Sarge's version is newer, and if there's one thing Gnome _doesn't_ do, that's use up less resources as the revisions progress. Most DE's are like that, Gnome and KDE are no exception.

I kinda thought that might be the case. Looks like I'm going to do a fresh install of Debian and hand select all my packages this time. And I'll definately do a custom 2.6 kernel just to free up every drop of CPU and RAM resources available. I would like to thank everyone for their time and suggestions. I love the support in the linux community. After I get my server up and running I'm going to install Debian on my main work machine. I'm slowly converting my LAN over to linux

Thanks again!

I though a follow-up post was needed here as I found the cause of my problem. After many failed attempts to improve performance under Sarge, I decided to check out Mandrake again and see how it configured itself by default. The mandrake installer ran slow and crashed once on me as well. It turns out that I had an old stick of 32MB SDRAM in bank 0 that was KILLING my performance. I removed the stick and put my fastest RAM in bank 0 and the machine started FLYING (for a PII 233 anyway ) So I re-installed Sarge -- it's awesome! Just to give an idea of how slow my machine was before -- Gnome or KDE load faster now than IceWM did before. I'm still not sure which Desktop I'm going to use, but I can surf the net on my server again. Lesson: don't use old spare parts in your servers -- they can hurt you more than they help.