Fedora 5 Speed, Gnome Desktop etc
 

Hi there,

I downloaded Fedora 5 last week and installed it yesterday. I am finding though it is a lot slower than my FC3 installation (apart from bootup). For instance.. X takes up about 290MB RAM, when I load Firefox in KDE its occupies about 150MB of RAM.

Onto Gnome...

By default I use KDE, but its felt quite sluggish compared to KDE 3.4? So I'm tyring out gnome, but moving a window on the desktop seems to cause CPU usage to jump to 99/100%. I'm curious to see if anyone else has the problem I'm about to describe. On the desktop, you know when you hold down the left-mouse button and try and highlight several icons so u can drag them somewhere... well do this on ur gnome desktop and try to sorta highlight your entire desktop, so at least 75% of the screen. (dont have to highlight icons etc) Does anyone notice that once you get past say 400 x 400 pixels it totally slows down?

I have fairly competant hardware - AMD Athlon 2500, 1GB DDR 400 RAM, Sata Hard drives etc.. guess the only dodgy area is my nvigia 6600 GC. This wouldn't affect the performance of my desktop though surely? Anyone got any ideas? Worried maybe I havent installed the FC5 release as I downloaded the ISO images on Monday 20th. Anyway of checking this is definately FC5 and not FC5test3? Most people have said FC5 is really fast, for me its quite laggy.

For FC5, the release states that it is optimized for pentium 4. This might be the problem since you have an AMD Athlon 2500. Try recompiling your kernel to see if it helps.

Right, seems a bit extreme to have to re-compile my kernel. Fedora 3 was optimised for P4 and that never caused me any problems.

Is there not a generic Fedora AMD kernel?

Do you mean the sources that Fedora uses? Install the kernel-devel packages that come included and configure it that way. Or you can get it from the source disks.

are you using a athlon 2500 or a atrhlon XP 2500. if your using the OLD athlon core like a thunderbird of such you might be running into problems with speed of proc.




what type of proc do you have and state it in mhz if you could...

Hi, I am using Athlon XP 2500 (Barton core). Find it hard to believe it would run this badly on such a CPU.

Ceros, don't quite follow what you're saying. Maybe this is an issue that will be addressed in kernel updates.

Maybe I'm not reading this right. What do you mean by generic Fedora kernel?

Sorry,

In previous Linux distro's, I have noticed there are AMD kernel's, a P4 kernel and such. However, typically the generic kernel that comes with the distro is ok. This is designed to work on pretty much any of the x386 processors and above. Just wondering if there was one tailored for AMD Athlon XP's available already that I could download and use instead. I have re-installed Fedora 5, this time with less packages and less services running. Some of the desktop is quite fast, but trying to "click" and highlight the entire desktop c(as described above - it struggles).

Also the firefox browser is ridiculously slow. On the stanton finley fedora 5 install page, it really stuggles when simply trying to scroll down it!

I see. I don't know of any specific AMD kernels that you can download. I know that you can reconfigure and recompile the FC5 kernel from the FC5 kernel sources. These sources can be added when you go into add/remove software and select the kernel-devel packages. When configuring your kernel, under Processor Type and configuration, there's an option to select an Athlon kernel.

OK, cheers for that - can see what you're getting at. However, I really cant believe Fedora 5 would be compiled to run this badly on an AMD XP processor. Yes, I can re-compile the kernel but each time there is a new kernel out I will have to do this. I don't have a problem with doing it once or twice, but with the nature of Fedora distributions, kernel updates are frequent.

I am hoping this issue will be resolved in time, but am curious to know if other AMD Athlon XP users have the same problem? Anyone else found Fedora 5 sluggish?

If its any use, here's the output of "uname -a"

Linux davros 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 #1 Tue Mar 14 15:48:33 EST 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Would post a screenshot of my process table...

Basically with LQ loaded in firefox..

Xorg VMsize = 297,572
Firefox = 114,036

FC5 runs badly on AMD!!! Is this the XP version of Linux :D

I solved that problem written by "Linux31" by reviewing the system bios parameters on my system.

One of the things that you might do is look at the bios settings on your motherboard. My amd semptron runs at 192ghz and I initially had the similar problem. Video was ever so sluggish. I then checked the bios settings. It had an amibios. I first chose a default option for performance setting, then I looked to see if I could push the cpu rate, which I did. Finally, looked at shared memory to the pci adapter. Shared memory to the video adapter was 128 meg, which you could prune down to 64meg or 32meg. As far as shared memory to the pci adapter, do not put the settings at zero. 32megs was my best setting. Turning it off will require opening the case and removing the lithium battery to permit resetting the bios to defaults.

My system has 512+256 = 768meg ram. A 200gig 16meg cache hard disk (IDE).

I find Core5 amply fast at booting. I really dont care about boot speeds, since it is not an operation I do every few minutes. I care about response time to mouse clicks, and I am happy with Core5 in this area.

Leslie

I have an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe M/B (Nforce 2chipset). I couldnt see such options in my BIOS. I altered my settings from "optimal" to "aggressive" and altered the AGP Aperture size from 256MB down to 64MB. I've found its made no difference. (My Geforce 6600 has 256MB memory).

Still found its made no difference. Some aspects of Fedora 5 are fast, but I still find the desktop far less responsive than FC3. Does anyone believe it could be the default graphics driver I'm using? Waiting for a new kernel to come out so I can install the Nvidia drivers (know there is a workaround, but a new kernel is expected anytime now!).

Another update.... I thought system performance was getting better. Then last night, I had 5 different browser windows open. My ram usage was over 600MB! The system had grounded to an almost complete halt and would take about 20 secs to switch from one application window to another.

Suggestions? Does this sound like anything any of you guys came across in earlier FC5 releases?