Hi,
I'm a reasonably well settled Suse (10) user, mainly for desktop work using KDE.

I have two PCs, almost identical- Gigabyte K8N-SLI mobos, Athlon 64 3500+, 1G RAM DDR 400 dual layer, SATA HDs. The other runs WinXP for my day job as my customers prefer (are locked into?) MSWindows. The Linux box also functions as a file server for the network around our house, although demand on it is small.

One of things that does irk me about Linux is the poor performance, notably long boot times and poor multitasking when compared to doing similar things on WIndows XP, given the same hardware specs. Other issues are poor program performance, but I suspect that's more to do with the application than the operating system.

So I was interested to read this

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=139&tag=nl.e539

Now, the (poor) boot times he quotes for the $100 PC are similar to what I get on my geewhizz box!!?? I'm experiencing around 2minutes with Linux > KDE, Windows < 20 seconds. I'm running a Samba server and mySQL. Windows has SQLServer and mySQL server.

OK, I can live with the slow boot, given the machine has only been restarted occasionally. But the slow loading of (KDE desktop) applications & their tendency to grab all the resources when running, which also brings everything else to a standstill, is a real PITA. Firefox takes 45 seconds plus to load etc.

I know the writer seems a bit of a linux hating troll, but I do have to agree with him on his key observations about the performance issues.

Are we wrong?


regards

You have something set up wrong, plain and simple. I can boot a KDE live CD in about a minute and I use fluxbox on a P4 3GHz with a fair bit of RAM and it boots to a fully working desktop in about 15 seconds. I didn't read that article because I didn't need to, your hardware should be running much quicker, you have problems with something that need fixing it isn't the fault of linux.

Use hdparm to make sure DMA is enabled on your hard drive. If its not, that would make the whole thing run like crap. If its not set, do hdparm -d1 /dev/whateveryourdriveis to try to set it. If it wont let you turn on DMA its probably because your kernel isn't configured correctly for your SATA drives and you may need to get a module for the controller to be able to use DMA and all that fancy stuff... My friend's computer had this problem right after I built it, it was a very fast machien, and ran like a junk heap Pentium I just because his SATA stuff wasn't being supported by the kernel and the drive was running VERY slowly. So try checking your kernel compliation and make sure SATA and all that is enabled in there, and that if there is a specific module you have to enable for your controller, that you enable it in the kernel compile as a module or built in.

you just have a bad/slow Linux build
I have noticed most rpm type distros suffer from this.
the factors can be many but basically consider rpm type distros optimized for as slow as possible on alot of different levels.
It is possible to build a Linux system so it is way lots faster than Windows on comparable hardware.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I wasn't looking for solutions as all the things you mention and much more have been dealt with accurately. I've decided to accept it as it is as the system is more than usable.

The point was that the author of the referenced article raises issues that reflect my experience and that of many others, by my observation.

All the best for the Silly Season,