Hi,

Here is my brand new system:

- P4 2.8 HT (hyperthreading).
- Asus P4P800-VM.
- 1 Gb RAM (400 MHz).
- WD 120 Gb P-ATA

> No additional graphic card (I use the onboard chip).
> No additional network card (I use the onboard chip).
> No additional sound card (I use the onboard chip).

My favorite OS: SuSE Pro 9.0 (kernel 2.4.21-166 SMP4G).

Fist of all: this system with XP is running fastly and well (unfortunately!).

Here is my problem:

The installation took me about 3 hours, only for a standalone workstation (basic packages). And the first boot took me about 20 minutes (awful)!

> The sound is running well.
> The network is running well (as my ADSL connection).

I only have a performance problem.

I directly updated my system online and I noticed a significative improvment. I can work, but it remains slower than my old system (an athlon 1400 with 512 Mb RAM), which is very frustrating!

Both processors (hyperthreading) are discovered by the kernel.

The workload of the processor and the disk are quite high, even when nothing is launched.

The two main processes, which are often running are (information gathered with the top command):

- X
- kdeinit

... maybe it's normal.

I look around in this forum to find a solution to my problem (with the keyword P4P800) and I found several interesting threads. I learned lots of things, but none of them were useful to solve my problem.

I tested the following commands:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

2765 MB 2.0 sec 1384.69 MB/Sec
148 MB 3.02 sec 49.02 MB/Sec

hdparm -v /dev/hda

multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 14593/255/63, sectors = 234441648,
start = 0

Do these information are correct? If my mainboard & bios support the 32-bit support, should I enable the IO_support parameter? What is the unmasking parameter?

I also tryed to run Knoppix 3.1 and 3.3 and they run
both fastly (much more than SuSE). However, the
3.3 version didn't discover that it was an
Hyperthreading processor (but did the 3.1 !).

I'm running out of ideas to find a solution to my
problem. Thanks for your precious help!

Sam.

I have this m/b too, running knoppix and a custom kernel, and everything is fine. Your disk i/o looks very fast to me. Your description sounds like a system with insufficient RAM, so constantly swapping. But 1Gb is more than enough for most things.

I don't think hyperthreading will make any difference you can notice.

What does 'top' say about memory usage and swap, and what percentage of memory and CPU are being used by the most active processes?

There is some more diagnostic advice on

http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/slow.html

Sorry not to be more specific, but I have not seen this behaviour except in cases of low RAM.

Hi,

I contacted SuSE helpdesk to have support about my problem. Here is their answer:

****************************

Sir, you may need to disable the acpi and the desktop parameter, i've
included instructions below on how to do this:

for the acpi, you can follow the instructions on how to remove the
desktop parameter and exchange this with the acpi disabling option:


Problems Caused by the Boot Parameter Desktop

Applies to: SUSE LINUX 9.0
Symptom
You notice some general problems during or after the installation. For
example:

* Performance problems
* Stability problems
* Problems when configuring the graphical interface
* Several hardware components cannot be configured

Cause
The boot parameter desktop used to optimize the system performance may result in stability problems in some cases.
Solution

1. Start the YaST2 Control Center and select the "System" section.
2. Select the option "Boot Loader Configuration" from the window on
the right.
3. Select the option "Available Sections" from the window "Boot
Loader Configuration" and press Edit.
4. Select the entry Linux from the window "Sections Management" (if
not preselected) and press Edit again.
5. Select the entry kernel in the same window and click on Edit.
When doing this, a small pop-up menu with a "Value" middle line
highlighted in blue is displayed.

Attention: If you have deleted this line (e.g. by accidentally
hitting the DEL key or a letter), press Cancel. Otherwise, the required
configuration will not be applied and you will not be able to start your
computer!

6. To edit the line, click on it with the mouse or press one of the
arrow keys (right or left).
7. Now move the cursor to the right with the arrow key until it is
placed at the beginning of the word desktop.
8. Then press the DEL key until desktop is deleted. Make sure you do
not delete the other entries.
9. Confirm all dialogs with OK or Finish and restart your computer.

Alternatively, you can change the boot loader configuration manually.
To do this, open the file

/boot/grub/menu.lst

as root user with an editor of your choice and remove the entry desktop
from the line beginning with the parameter kernel.

If you use lilo as your boot loader, the changes must be made in the
file /etc/lilo.conf.


Now exchange the

"desktop"

parameter for

"acpi=off"

(without the quotes), now your system should work correctly, also make
sure that Plug and Play OS is disabled in the BIOS.

If this should fail you will also have to use the standard kernel
instead of the smp one (which is also not supported), you can do this via
YaST2, the standard kernel is called k_deflt

****************************

I followed this advice but without any success. Maybe it's the distro...

I tried some distro based on liveCD like Knoppix 3.3
and Mandows 1.4, and they work correctly and quite
fastly.

Then, I tried Redhat Linux Entreprise 3.0 ES.
Installation is much faster than with SuSE 9.0 (about
15 minutes for Redhat compared with 1h30 for SuSE in
my configuration). But, the boot and the general use
is also very slow, as with SuSE. About 4 minutes to
boot on to the login window and about 1 minute to load
the gnome/kde environment.

After that, I finally tried Mandrake 9.2 Powerpack.
Installation is as fast as with redhat. However, the
boot and the use is faster as well! And the difference
is very astonishing. I really have the P4 2.8 HT with
1 GB RAM I bought! I would say : as fast as with windows
XP... ;-)

I guess that the "Mandrake" kernel is a little bit
more recent thant the SUSE version. But redhat, SuSE and Mandrake use SMP kernels. And Mandrake uses ACPI successfully.

Hope this will help someone who is in my situation.

Bye!

Sam.

Just a bit of feedback. I started running SUSE Linux 9.0 Pro on an old Tiny PC with 700MHz Intel P3 and 384Mb of RAM. This was just an experiment to see what Linux was like. Like Sam, I found the performance pathetic. It would take literally minutes to load Yast2. In fact opening virtually any program on the desktop took minutes. It was just unusable. I trawled through google looking for similar problems to mine but with no luck. After some weeks, I had all but given up ever getting the system to run at an acceptable speed and was really regretting buying Linux at all.

Then, by a bizarre coincidence, my cat walked over the mains gang socket behind my PCs one day and managed to power cycle the lot. The strange thing was that when the Linux machine came back up it was running really fast. Faster by a factor of 10-100 times in fact. I was a happy bunny again. I still trawled through google looking for something that would explain what the conflict was with my machine, but alas still couldn't find anything. Then, as inevitably happens, I was forced into rebooting the Linux machine and it was back to running dead slow again.

I've spent weeks hunting for a solution to this problem, and then today I chanced on this thread. And what do you know, the solution provided to Sam of removing the Desktop parameter in the Boot Loader config actually fixed my problem. So I'm a happy bunny again.

I can't but help thinking there may be a number of other Linux newbies struggling with this problem out there, and this solution ought to have a higher visibility. But I would just like to register my thanks to this forum, and Sam for obtaining the fix, even if it didn't immediately fix his problem, it certainly did fix mine!!

Charlie

Hi there,

I have exactly the same problem, ASUS P4P800-VM, 1024 gig RAM, internal graphics, internal IDE, internal network, additionally a PCI-U2W-SCSI-controller (Tekram) running SuSE 9.0 with Kernel 2.4. 21-199_default (updated via YOU to most recent version (as of today)), but the machine still feels quite slow. Can't tell about Win XP, it runs SuSE 9.0 only.

I also observed problems during initial install (machine hung after first reboot with SMP-kernel and ACPI enabled) which could be circumvented by disabling ACPI (acpi=noapic), but the performance problems where still there.

The P4P-mobo is only "partly" supported by SuSE according to their hardware-database (i.e. not tested at all under SuSE 9.0).

I will try to file a bug-report, maybe they will find some solution for this, which works better than just "acpi=off" + delete "desktop" in Grub and disable ACPI, plug&play-os in the BIOS.

Bye,

mAd|V|AX

I have found Mandrake 9.2 much faster than Suse8.1 in running programs, openning windows. However the boot time time is about the same and installation time not much different.
My system was having lock-up´s when both APIC and ACPI were enabled and i had to at least disable one if them.
I am still having problem with my USB mouse´s wheel in konqueror locking up the system from time to time.
Overall the mandrake is a better platform mainly due to their system of software downloading.
Regards, Ramin

hi guys. I use an AMD 2500 Barton core with 512 MB DDR3200/2700. I recently installed SuSE 9 on my second hard drive (Didn't want to mess with Windows partitions as I'm a noob to Linux) only to observe a severely slow performance. the mouse lags....Konqueror is just aweful and crashes the whole system from time to time. After googlin a bit I even got more confused. Because I've done an FTP installation of it I can get no support from their site either. DOES ANYONE have any suggestion on what I should do. I would appreciate it very much
regards
-Sam

Besides the advice in earlier posts, the most obvious diagnostic thing is to run the 'top' command, in a console window from the command line. This tells you which processes are taking the most CPU cycles and memory. Real hogs will be at the top of the list, but on an idling system nothing should be taking more than a few % of cpu cycles. If no hogs and still slow, I really don't know any answer besides the comments above.

For some reason the ARTS sound daemon artsd seems be taking a lot of cycles on my system, but I can just kill it with command 'killall artsd'.

Even if the original problem has been months ago, I think someone could even now (like me) try to find a solution to this problem... so I post an answer. If this is not correct (I'm a newbie at LQ too ;-) ) please tell me what I should have done at this case... with a Community Mail to all users of this thread? Because of the long time, I mean... ;-)


But now to the reason of my posting:
I had the same problem too (P4P800-VM with PIV-3GHz), but I SOLVED it!
(Yes, I'm a ... but there's a saying about blind chicken here in Germany...)

I had this Problem too... and googled around several days trying and trying...
and someday I found the answer:

To make it short:
The problem seems to be the onboard graphics chip.

I only wanted a console on this machine, so I decided to give it 1MB of the shared memory (setting in BIOS), the other <1Gig memory was for the machine itself. It was extremely slow (booting Suse 9.1 to runlevel3 was about 8 minutes), top showed something about 1.5% cpu time - used by top. The SATA-throughput was fairly ok though... (matches with the messages here...)

Then I found out on my google-run that I only had to set the shared memory of the onboard graphics chip to 32MB (maximum value)... and I could not believe it - the machine instantly bootet up within 25 seconds. Top now doesn't even recognize a cpu time for top or other processes.

My suggestions are:

First try to set the onboard graphics chip shared memory to 32MB - just to test it. If it then works like rock candy you've got two options:
1. Leave it the way it is (if you don't need the memory at the moment, and keep suggestion 2 for later optimization if it's necessary). That's the option I use at the moment...
2. Install a graphics card and disable the onboard graphics chip completely. If you just need a console, maybe an old PCI graphics card would even be sufficient, otherwise buy a cheap AGP4x graphics card.

Hope this helps anyone... I really was near going nuts on this...

Best wishes,
//mc