Hello CG.,

I not adding anything new (or probably anything you don't know), but Linux and SATA in general don't work very well together yet. There has been much development in the area, but there are (obviously) still problems. I am not familiar with RedHat at all, but you may want to check my web site also in your attempts to fix your slow machine. There are also distro's out there specifically for 64bit AMD's also.. you may want to check this out too.. Good Luck!


bc

I have read the posts, but have one question for you. How much RAM is in your system? If you have 64MB, then you will need to add more RAM to your system to get Fedora Core to speed up.

I have found that Fedora Core is sluggish with 64MB of RAM installed in my Deskpro EP/266. But, when I upgraded the RAM to 128MB, Fedora Core ran significantly faster. This is because the system did not have to swap memory segments between RAM and the swap partition.

and while you are at it, type the following logged in as root:

hdparm -c3 /dev/hda

This should speed up your hard drive by utilizing 32-bit disk access rather than the default 16-bit disk access.

Hope this helps.

I have been using FC1 on a pentium 4 for half a year and am quite pleased with it (256MB). I just tried to install FC2 on a new celeron with 128MB. Well it was so slow it was almost unusable. Anyway I found that FC2 has NFS version 4 which isn't directly compatible with with NFS version 3 which runs on another celeron box/server. So that was the end of the matter with FC2. The new celeron box ran quite well with FC1 but still slow so I added another 128MB. Now it is almost as fast as the pentium box.

Yes, I think Linux GUI is slower than Windows on the same hardware but money I save from free software is better put in higher performance hardware.

Well out of the box maybe. The thing that is great or bad (depending on who you are) with Linux is that you should tweak it and tweak it some more (IE recompile the kernel and many other things already mentioned) before you have a super fast system. If you do it right, it should blow M$ away!

bc

I dont have a problem with Fedora Core 3 on SATA drives, im running 2 Rapters dual booting. Seperat hardrive for Fedora. After many updates i think im running an i686 version of the Kernal. I think Fedora runs fine and im very happy with the stability in the programs compared to windows XP of which i have been a die hard fan untill now.

My RH 7.2 Got really slow and even impossible to log into when I setup crond jobs.
I needed to be querying several SNMP enabled radios after every 5 min.

I think there are some progs running in the backgound or something like that.

Ngwasuma

Hi chicken george, I see you've gotten a warm introduction to the world of Linux zealotry. When asking perfectly legitimate questions like why is Linux so slow, you're met with hate spewing zealots that scream at you that it's not slow and how dare you question Linux's superiority.

I personally think Linux is kind of cool and I use it sometimes at work and play with it at home. But I don't walk around with blinders on. I am able to see the good and the bad. A zealot however, usually takes the "speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil mentality" and refuses to ever even consider the idea that Linux might have a fault or two and Windows actually has something to offer.

Example:

You run Linux for the first time and are disappointed that everything takes 5 to 10 times longer than it did on Windows. You ask why and are told that you actually just perceived it wrong and are imagining things:

"linux isn't slow."

Ha, looks like your brain was playing tricks on you. It actually wasn't slow, you just dreamed it up.

Then they'll usually take a needless swipe at Windows like:

"install-and-everything-works-but-freezes-once-a-day"

Which is funny, because at work I leave my Windows XP machines booted up for weeks at a time, using them for everything from development, to data processing, to web design, while running apache and my-sql all at the same time. But again, my mind must have been playing tricks on me as well because Windows must freeze once a day, right?

gandalf2041 said:

"Some in the Linux community are truly passionate about their hatred of Windows."

He is indeed correct, which means that it's nearly impossible to have a legitimate debate with some of these zealots because no matter what the reality is, they can only see their skewed version of it that says "Linux good, Windows bad".

That being said, here are some of my experiences with it over the years.

I started with Red Hat 7.x using KDE and noticed right away that it was very slow.

Some time went by, hardware got better and I tried Red Hat 9 on a newer machine. For all practical purposes, it was just as slow.

Tried Fedora 2 on a Dual 2.8Ghz Xeon machine, and guess what? Just as slow.

Finally, tried FC2 on Dual Opteron 246s at work, and I will admit that it was a slight bit faster. But absolutely nowhere close to the speed of Windows.

This dispells the oft-spouted myth that "you can run Linux on old hardware, you don't need the latest and greatest to run it". Wrong, dead wrong. You absolutely do need the latest and greatest. It will bring even the beefiest hardware to its knees.

Other suggestions usually are:

Recompile your kernel, the default one shipped with the distros are bloated. Wrong again. I've recompiled a million times, stripping out every last driver and gizmo that I didn't need. My kernel is tiny, is optimized for my specific processor, and has a minimal number of modules. Guess what? Still slow!

Enable DMA on your disks. This definitely *will* make a big difference. Everything will be faster when DMA is enabled.

A few areas I encountered slowness in are:

Boot time. I've disabled every unnecessary process. I think I've got like only 4 that run on start up and it still takes longer than Windows to boot.

File I/O. Since the beginning, I've always noticed that copying lots of data from one place to another is painfully slow. Easily 20 times slower than on Windows. Sure NTFS may be closed and proprietary, which sucks, but man did those guys at MS do their homework. It is blindingly fast. The ext2 and ext3 file systems that Linux uses by default absolutely suck. To be honest, I've not played with other file systems. But I'm assuming they aren't better because if they were, the distro people would make them the default, right?

Program loading time. On Windows, when I double click an icon to run a program, it's usually loaded within less than a second from when my mouse button goes up from the second click. Trying the same thing on Linux just made me laugh. There is a noticeable pause every time you run a program. Some programs are worse than others. The all time worst being Open Office. Compare the time it takes to launch Word in Windows (less than 1 second) with the time it takes to launch OO Writer (30 - 40 seconds).

That's all for now. So to answer your question george, it *is* slower and there's nothing you can do about it. Have fun twiddling your thumbs while waiting for things to load on your new $2000 machine.

Hi chicken george, its the luck of the draw same pcs are fast from the get go and others require a little tweaking. Also try as many distros as you can until you find one your completely happy with. As for the first few replies I'm sure you'd get similar from a windows based forum if you went there and said windows was slow.
Picking the correct kernel, filesystem and obviously the dma settings are crucial. And boot times can be carved done tremendously by tweaking them. Personally I see it as a challenge to use Linux getting the hardware I need to use to work. And finding the best programs to get the job done for me has been great too.
I've been using Linux on and off for 5-6 years but have been using it as my only os for around 6 months and haven't found something I can't yet get done with it. As for the everyday performance aspect of it, I get equivalent performance as compared to Windows, boot times, program execution times are all around the same, copying partition to partition is far faster than windows, unraring big files 4gb+ is slower.
To say Linux is slow isn't correct, you need the right sort of desktop environment to suit your hardware, if you've got a p233 with 64mb ram, then you don't use a full kde desktop with all the bells and whistles turned on. With the processor you have the performance should be very good indeed. I use a p4 3.4 and 1gb ram my performance is great.

Thanks
enabl

I've been using linux for quite a while now.

You say FC and RedHat are slow. I'm running FC on a laptop and it boots just as fast as the XP Pro machine in the next room.

With that being said, I've made few to no real tweaks. I also have a desktop sitting beside me with Slackware current on it.
It runs circles around any of these machines.

I wouldn't dog on linux, but the distros themselves. I'm a FC user and would say that it's the easiest, but slackware definitely is the faster of the breed.
Then there's always opinions..

www.fedorafaq.com and www.fedoraforum.org maybe be a better solution if its directly related to FC3 and SATA drives..i personally was unable to boot knoppix on my desktop computer which uses an SATA hd so im not too sure on it.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by chicken george
[B]Hello, I've been a linux user for about 2 days now and have noticed that linux is a lot slow then windows at everything..... Even starting up..... I've not been sitting here with a stop clock but I might buy one just so I can post the differences...... I'm running the 64bit version on an AMD xp3500 and it feels like i'm on an old Cyrix 233Mhz machine.......

hey..hey hey now ......I still have an old Cyrix 233mhz. with Vector Linux on it .....and it blows past my p4 1.4 with redhat or suse or mandrake only the compile times alot slower

Sorry for the word, but I tried many of them. They are all made mostly (if you are using x86) for 386 architecture, therfore 10 or more years behind time. Only kernel is going with time. I hated them for it, so I found

.... G E N T O O .....

It's damn GOOOOOD, and lightning FAST.

Installation takes some time, knowledge to do it is in the handbook that comes with it and you just follow it step by step.

Results : You have linux that has every line compiled for your computer. !!!!

NOW and ONLY NOW you have operating system and programs that use your hardware to the maximum.

There are no slow 386 rpms to slow down and put you years behind time. And finally you get what you paid for the hardware.


Take some time, install Gentoo (www.gentoo.com). You will not regret it. Try it once - love stays forever.

And also you will learn more about Linux in 1-2 days than you wouldnt for months if you used other distros.

Good luck , ...

In other words it compiles a kernel for you? Which isn't all that hard to do in the first place.

Actualy bonecrusher, drzile means exactly what he sais. The specialised kernel is just the beginning. Gentoo does actualy compile every single line of code of every single program according to your hardware (and software) needs. Libraries that you will never use are not included (don't use KDE? exclude all KDE extensions. saves ram/program start time). You can even go so far as to recompile your compiler so you can compile things faster! It was very very fast compared to Fedora Core 2 on the same machine (which I found to run quite quickly as well). FC is still a good distro, just targeted differently. And that was using 2 Western Digital Raptors (SATA). FC2 had no dramas with the SATA drives either. This was over a year ago though.

I recommend serious linux users to at least look into gentoo. Unfortunately though it's not for the faint hearted. The installation instructions don't miss a beat, and it's an awesome learning experience, but it's still a long road. Well worth it though.

There's that link again: (www.gentoo.com)...tempting isn't it

Cheers all. BTW, chicken george, I must appologise also for flaming linux nuts. They're a poor representation of an otherwise fairly helpful greater community. Try to ignore them if you can.

Pete.

People I have to say you're missing lots of important stuff here!!!!

1st. what is your swap space??? double the ram?
2nd. don't you know that windows is f***in' doing some strange operations all the time with your hard disk? linux uses as I consider it much better system for ram as disk cache which results in much longer life and much less sound effects from your hdd, haven't you notice windows boot drives your harddisk to the limit of sound level definitely not like linux
3rd. Gnome is considered to be much faster then KDE so chicken consider a try at Gnome GUI\

I'm very satisfied with FC3, currently testing FC4test2 but MS word is loading for 1second only if you have already loaded it before in your current session, my hardware is not 64bit but windows needs more and more time to boot as you use it...

also if I run a windows game using emulator for linux it's smooth and actually faster