hi

i wud like to know if there is a way to improve the response time of the application. i find the application r slow to react and also the applications do not refresh fast. i click on a minimized window, its takes sometime to display. i use gnome,fedora core3 on a P4 computer.

Maybe give some kind of definition as to how slowly your system responds? Also, how much RAM do you have, what windowmanager are you using, what other programs do you have running the background? Whilst it's running slowly, from a console type in "top" and paste the output back here, as this show how much memory is in use and what processes are running.

hi thanks for offering help. i have 256 MB RAM and swap memory of 550 MB. heres the ouput of top,

Tasks: 60 total, 2 running, 58 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 58.7% us, 7.9% sy, 2.0% ni, 30.8% id, 0.0% wa, 0.6% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 223856k total, 217328k used, 6528k free, 9452k buffers
Swap: 562232k total, 0k used, 562232k free, 67136k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4514 arunvk 15 0 48808 10m 7576 S 23.9 5.0 0:15.16 nt
4041 root 15 0 69088 28m 7580 S 19.8 13.1 15:37.11 X
4411 arunvk 15 0 120m 52m 17m S 14.5 24.2 5:48.55 firefox-bin
4455 arunvk 15 0 38864 13m 8800 S 7.6 6.2 0:11.46 gnome-terminal
4352 arunvk 25 10 34400 19m 10m R 2.2 9.0 0:57.26 rhn-applet-gui
4229 arunvk 16 0 22728 9.9m 7172 S 0.2 4.5 0:01.42 gnome-session
4338 arunvk 15 0 14068 7588 6200 S 0.2 3.4 0:09.07 metacity
4373 arunvk 15 0 23736 11m 7876 S 0.2 5.2 0:09.09 wnck-applet
4534 arunvk 16 0 2716 992 784 R 0.2 0.4 0:00.16 top
1 root 16 0 3644 596 512 S 0.0 0.3 0:01.10 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.51 events/0
4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.07 khelper
16 root 15 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
87 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.15 kblockd/0
95 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
151 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
152 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.11 pdflush
154 root 7 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
153 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.28 kswapd0
245 root 18 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
445 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.18 kjournald
1606 root 8 -10 1992 564 448 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.76 udevd
3568 root 19 0 1632 560 484 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 acpid
3593 root 16 0 2824 296 244 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 inputattach
3605 root 16 0 2808 576 500 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.04 gpm
3676 xfs 16 0 4632 1708 924 S 0.0 0.8 0:00.09 xfs
3695 root 18 0 2156 440 380 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 mingetty
3696 root 19 0 1900 440 380 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 mingetty
3697 root 18 0 3212 440 380 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 mingetty
3698 root 18 0 2228 440 380 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 mingetty
3699 root 22 0 2740 440 380 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 mingetty

this is the most common scenario of the system. sometimes i run either xmms or openoffice. but never together.

thanks again.

Add more memory. If you launch an application, it should be stored in memory and open up faster the next time if the machine is not powered off or no other applications were used extensively where xmms or any other application might have been bumped from memory.

If you find yourself opening just OpenOffice and XMMS; and both are opening like they haven't been opened on your system just after closing, it's time for a memory upgrade as OpenOffice itself can be pretty intensive on a machine with only 256MB RAM.

i guess i have to do that. also will it help if i use a different window mangager or a different theme. right now iam using the default settings that come with gnome.

Using a lighter desktop or WM will most likely help. Gnome and KDE are very intensive desktops themselves, using something like Fluxbox, Blackbox, XFce and or the countless others would help tremendously to save some memory usage.

You might also make sure that your video card driver is properly installed. I am using XFCE4 on a 1GHz machine with 512MB RAM, and a Matrox G400 card. Just replacing the default XFree86 driver with the proprietary Matrox Linux driver seems to have helped performance noticeably.

These sorts of response-time problems will definitely be linked to XWindows/XOrg, not to the system at large.

The "NT" process (whatever that is) is consuming a lot of CPU in your display, and "X" is right behind it. If "X" is seen persistently doing that ... from a top display that is not running in a terminal window, then a poor configuration of that subsystem is strongly indicated.

thanks a lot for the tips guys. i will try them out.