Good to see a handful of replies guys!

I upgraded to the new kernel Fedora released yesterday, I found its made no difference speed wise at all. I am starting to think its an Xorg issue. I've got a Geforce 6600 but havent gotten around to installing the nvidia drivers (due to initial fc5 issue). Does the new kernel now support 3rd party kernel modules?

i tried to install nvidia drivers on 2.6.16-1.2080_FC5smp and no luck.

I haven't yet installed FC5, but if it goes that bad... I'll take a look at it though, but I hope a 5.1 appears soon.

For those of you trying to install 3rd party drivers (nvidia), check this link

Cheers!

I upgraded FC5 from FC4, and it ran like a dog, so I did a clean install, and it runs like a charm. I'm on an AMD Sempron. I don't know the model, but it's 2GHz with 512Mb of RAM. Everything runs great, and I prefer it to FC4.

For the person who had 5 browser windows open, and had issues - what browser? Firefox 1.5 has serious memory leak issues, which has been reported extensively in the press and on various web sites. I myself have had major problems with it under Win2K.

My question - I want to add 3rd party items to the menus, but this is turned off. According to "Red Hat Fedora Core 4 Unleashed", page 272, I can copy default-modules.with-menu-editing to default-modules.conf, and make changes in there. However, I can't find this file in FC5 (/etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules). Can anyone assist me in this?

Thanks

This thread is very interesting.

I am also experiencing a drastic "sluggish" behaviour with FC5.
Well, the loading times are faster, no doubt. But like what most people here experience, web browsing is terrible slow. I don't mean loading times.. but more like scrolling of pages (for eg, the wonderful Stanton Finley's FC page (sorry can't post url here...) and many more!!!) IE on WinXP scrolls better than Firefox and even Epiphany on FC5!

I like to think I have a reasonable fast system (AMD64 San Diego). I have Gentoo on another partition and Firefox does not have this problem. So it must be something in FC5 that is broken or isn't configured correctly.

Is there a way we can compile FC5 from source? I mean from the .src.rpm files? Will that make things faster?

The problems you are describing are exactly the problems I had for the first two days. The generic 'nv' driver for X is your problem, from your descriptions.

To get the NVidia driver to build correctly, you have to update the installer: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=62021

Now, FC5 runs like a champ. For the record, I disabled SELinux at install, I would suggest doing the same. I'm hearing that there is a 60% performance hit for systems running it. I assume that you aren't running a server, so this shouldn't impact you much.

My system:
Compaq r3000z
Athlon XP-M 2800+ (32 Bit)
[GeForce4 420 Go 32M] (rev a3)
NVidia NForce3 chipset

Hi Livewire!

Thanks for the tip. I am reinstalling FC5 and with the patch update from nvidia.. wait.. nvidia has just release a new driver!!! I will install that too. :)

Will let you everyone here if it works.

That was my first guess. FC5 runs like greased lightning on my Intel chipset laptop using integrated Intel Extreme (or something like that) video card. Now can;t say about other vid cards, since I've held off installing on my desktop due to nVidia issues. But on FC4 X and TVtime used DOUBLE the CPU time with default drivers compared to proprietary nvidia drivers. So wouldn;t surprise me if same issue remains with FC5. I've even got a couple old before and after screenshots:

http://4crito.com/msgbrd/pics/palm_ssh2.jpg
http://4crito.com/msgbrd/pics/palm_ssh3.jpg
Running top command on my Palm Tungsten T5 handhled networked wirelessly via a Pico Bluetooth access point, by the way. :D

I put up a post earlier on here about having some serious lags with FC5 on my Turion64 laptop. I ultimately ended up scrapping the installation and have moved to Ubuntu on that machine.

However, my desktop was FC4 and I thought I'd try FC5 on it (it's an Athlon XP machine). I will say that I'm not having any of the problems on my desktop that I was having on my laptop--the performance is more than acceptable, if not also faster than FC4.

So, as far as my experience with FC5 goes:

FC5 on x86_64/Turion64 3700+ (laptop): dog slow
FC5 on i386/Athlon XP 2600+ (desktop): fast

(Equal amount of RAM on both machines)

This has been a learning experience for me.

I've read through more post from various forums and I think the "sluggish" behaviour seem to be related to Xorg7 or Nvidia. But so far I have not come across any solutions to it.

Updated using the new nvidia 8756 driver but the responsiveness is still the same. But now, I find the my mouse cursor is "flickering" whenever it is loading/displaying animation.

Any ideas?

yeauch,

Yeah, I can't say that I know what the deal was in my case either although, as you can tell from the posts, I wasn't the only one with the problem. Unfourtinately, the only thing I didn't try while I had FC5 installed on my laptop was to install the proper ATI (fglrx) video drivers. The reason for that was simply because, at the time, they weren't working (at least not according to Livna).

It comes as no surprise to me that using proper video drivers will improve performance; however, I'm still relucant to believe that the kind of "performance bottlenecks" I was dealing with were due to poor video card performance--or even poor CPU performance. To say that the system was unresponsive would be an understatement; it would spend several full seconds at a time simply sitting there and not doing anything before it finally decided to respond to certain things. This means I could move my cursor and even work in other applications that were up, but there would be no disk activity or anything. Then, 30 seconds later, Evolution would pop up. In fact, the behavior felt a lot like using a system with a broken/stale NFS mount (i.e. you're trying to hit a filesystem mounted on NFS but the server is down)--if you've had this experience before, you know what I mean.

For the record, I'm going to reinstall FC5 on an extra partition on the lappy when I get a chance and actually install the ATI video drivers this time (since they will be available). I'll keep ya posted.

sancho,

Wow... I can't imagine having Evolution open up after 30 seconds! Well, the sluggishness that I am experiencing isn't that serious... I guess I am just frustrated that my WinXP performs better than FC5 (after all that hype!). I've read somewhere it could be a xorg thingy. Don't know if there is already a fix in Rawhide/development repo.

Anyway, I got the flickering mouse cursor fixed. More like a workaround by setting "HWCursor" "false" under "devices" in xorg.conf. The people in Nvidia forums says that it is any old bug... but don't know why isn't it fixed yet.

Linux has a tendency to utilise as much of the ram as it can. You have 1 gig of ram and Fedora trying use 600mb of it. I have 2gigs of ram and Fedora is trying to use 1.5 gigs of it. For desktop performance it might help to make sure your drivers are installed correctly, because thats what alot of it falls back to. Ideally Xorg should only use between 1- 10% of your main cpu. I noticed it spikes more often after switching to a card without 2d acceleration.

Sancho, when you had your problems with FC5, did you try reinstalling it? I had a similar problem wtih FC3 on my desktop (AMD Athlon64 3000+; 512mb DDR3200; GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x; 2x 80gb 7200RPM HDD; Asus A8V Deluxe MoBo). Damn thing wouldn't run, or even walk. It would crawl between applications, getting a folder to open would take 10-60 seconds, no clue what would cause the variation. I didn't know much about Linux at the time, and still have no idea what the problem was. I did a complete reinstall, and everything was fine. Maybe you've just got a bad install?

Crito, I want your PDA :) And I agree with you that the default video drivers are crap. They look nice, so long as nothing is moving on the screen. Launching any applicaitons, especially 3d-enabled ones, and your performance goes down the tube.

Also, I've never had any luck using the precompiled Nvidia drivers from Livna. If I can get the magic combination of kernel and nvidia package, I get lousy performance. But if I use the nvidia-installer downloaded from their FTP site, everything is fine. Just a thought.

i havnt read much of the post but all i can say is that the issue of speed is becaus of the NVidia drivers not installing properly. when i upgraded from FC4 to FC5 is saw a similiar drop in speed and the drivers refused to install. i reverted back to FC4 for now but i believe the drivers can be installed using some "shady" tactics. http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=66851 should have the instructions for you although i havnt tried them myself.