In the last week I loaded SuSE Linux 7.3 on my computer. After a little work, everything loaded fine and all works, all but the printer(still working on that). I also have Win 98 on a different hd. Windows is on a 40gb drive and linux is on a 6gb drive. Linux seems to run slower than windows as far as starting apps like kmail and star office. Is this normal or are there things I can change to boost the speed. Thanks for any help.

One reason Linux might seem slow to start apps is because KDE itself is slow. If you are looking for speed, you might want to check out using a different window manager with no desktop environment. Switching to things like WindowMaker, Blackbox and IceWM can significantly boost your speed at the slight hassle of having to install and configure another window manager.

Could also be the hdd speed, what sort is it? ata33?
try hdparm -tT /dev/hdx
where x is whichever disc you're on
a=primary master
b= primary slave
c= secondary master
d=secondary slave

and tell us how fast it goes. There are tweaks to improve the speed, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.
Jim

Here's the hard drive speed tweak info. Give it a try; it makes quite a difference.

The speed is 64 mb in 10.82 sec. or 5.91 mb per sec. This is after I changed the drive to 32 bit. Is there any other hints that can speed it up. That helped a little

Mine is quite a bit higher than yours. I get 130.61 MB/sec on Timing buffer-cached reads. Maybe linux seems slow because your hardware is slow. On the machine I'm on, I ran Windows for about a year. When I converted to Linux on this same exact machine, it seemed alot faster, especially browsing the internet (I use Konqueror on KDE).

Another thing, StarOffice 5.2 is known to be slow starting up. That's an issue with the program, not your system. I hear version 6.0 (to be released sometime mid-year 2002) is quit a bit faster.

It's remotely possible, though not too likely, that you're looking at a kernel bug, I'd heard of some machines that had problems with slow virtual memory somewhere around the 2.4.10 kernels. See if SUSE has a kernel update. (If you want to go it alone, get at least 2.4.17 from www.kernel.org.)

Hard drive manufacturers are famous for making large, slow, drives. Try shutting down unnecessary deamons (services) to conserve virtual memory. Another drasitic option is to use a small partition on your Windoze drive for swap. (See mkswap, swapon, /etc/fstab, cfdisk.) You could set the system to use the faster drive for swap first. But this could involve fips, and making another partition on an already full drive.

You can't get the star office 6.0 beta any more (I've heard) but you can get Open Office, from openoffice.org, which is the same thing or newer.

glock19, what are specs of that hard drive you tested and are you using an EIDE or a SCSI controller.

Quantum 30 gig EIDE
Dual 1gig P3
1 gig ECC

Hey,

My apps also start slow and my video is choppy. Some games don't even play right, sort of like 1 frame per minute.

Mine goes:



linux:~ # hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 11.88 seconds = 10.77 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 7.55 seconds = 8.48 MB/sec
Hmm.. suspicious results: probably not enough free memory for a proper test.

Also says:

free -tom: my mem has 375 total, 352 used, and 22 free.


AMD K6/2 500MHz
8 Gig IDE
32M video

Help.

nlg

You know what now that you mention it, wayyyy back (like a year ago ) When I first started using Linux, I was playing TuxRacer and it was moving normal speed, and everything was great.

Pretty much same PC specs maybe a little less RAM then, but that shouldn't matter.

And now when I try to play it, it moves at ultra slow speed. I try to click "play" and my mouse can't even make it over there for like 30 seconds, really. Then once it gets there, The next screen sits there forever.

I can't really think of anything else that has this same problem, just TuxRacer.

Can anyone tell me what's up with that? Thanks.

SPECS:
Athlon 900mhz
ASUS DDR MOBO
640MB PC2100 DDR RAM
ATI Rage Fury Pro 32mb (video card)
SoundBlaster Live! MP3+5.1 (soundcard)

huh huh, guess I have my specs in my signature line, huh huh.

Your problem MasterC is your not getting hardware acceleration out of your ATI card.

You can use hdparm -i /dev/hda to get some info and see what dma mode your harddrive supports on my computer it looks like this:

Model=Maxtor 4D060H3, FwRev=DAH017K0, SerialNo=D3HCV6YE
Config={ Fixed }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=4047/16/255, CurSects=-217054981, LBA=yes, LBAsects=120069936
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255)
Drive Supports : ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 0 : ATA-1 ATA-2 ATA-3 ATA-4 ATA-5 ATA-6
Kernel Drive Geometry LogicalCHS=7474/255/63 PhysicalCHS=29428/16/255

if it says that it supports anything higer than the one with the * then you can change it with:

hdparm -X16~18 for SDMA 0~2, 32~34 for MDMA 0~2, 64~70 for UDMA 0~6 /dev/hda

Also when you boot up look for a line looking something like this

VP_IDE: VIA vt8233 (rev 00) IDE UDMA100 controller on pci00:11.1

to see what your motherboard supports.




hdparm -tT /dev/hda /dev/hdb

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.48 seconds =266.67 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.88 seconds = 34.04 MB/sec

/dev/hdb:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.47 seconds =272.34 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.34 seconds = 27.35 MB/sec

ronin24,

Okay, after trying your suggestion, I got this:


linux:~ # hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 3.08 seconds = 41.56 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 5.24 seconds = 12.21 MB/sec

Excellent improvement on the buffer-cache, but not so great on the buffered disk. Why is that? To be honest, I think this is all I am going to get out of it. But maybe...

Thanks, nlg.