Hey everyone,

Just installed FC3 on my laptop, Dell Inspiron 8200 1.7 intel mobile cpu, 512mem, geforce mobile. I had the same install on one of my desktops running 1ghz athlon thunderbird with 630mem, geforce 2. My desktop ran fast and I was using KDE on both, but my laptop would take for ever to load kde or open a terminal and I could have washed my car by time openoffice writer opened. Well I installed fc3 because I installed fc2 on my x86_64 machine and I liked it so why not install fc3 on laptop. well same issue fc3 slow on laptop. Any suggestions on how I can diagnose the problem of why this is? kernel is compiled for this processor.

if you need more info let me know!

thanks!

I seem to have the same problem on my Dell Inspiron 2500 256mb. I had Mandrake 9.2 on it before which ran much faster than FC3 runs now. Anything that narrows down what could be going wrong would be great.

Perhaps FC3 is just slower than Mandrake 9.2.

I'm running it on my Latitude C600. (PIII 750, 384mb RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility) It boots slower than other distros that I've tried, but once it's up and running it does fine. Even after removing most of the services it still takes awhile to boot compaired to other distros running a 2.6 kernel.

Have you tried disabling unnecessary services?

As root, run 'setup', and disable unnecessary system services, as they're probably hogging a few resources.

Your HDD may also not be running in DMA mode, check using hdparm.

Make sure you've installed the nvidia drivers too, hardware acceleration speeds things up heaps.

Hope this helps a little bit =)

Cheers,

~Rhett

Hey guys,

sorry for such a late reply... Started a new job!

anyway I had some luck (i thought) I ran updatedb as root and rebooted and the computer started running fine and fast. Although 2 days ago the problem came back. I ran updatedb again and it is still slow. I'm keeping track of which processes are being run. I did take out a lot of start up processes and it doesn't seem to help. I have installed the latest nvidia drivers and will check about the dma mode and get back to you guys!

again sorry for such a late reply!

Rather than start another thread, I am having similar problems to yours. (I know this is not a laptop, so if the moderator wishes to move it, I understand)

I have done a fresh installation on the same machine that I have been running FC1 for over a year. Normally no probs. Now incredibly slow! I have an Elite K7V mobo, XP2400, S3 Trio 3D graphics card and lots of RAM.

Turned off SELinux, + other non used services. No joy. Shame as I have been using RH since 5 and find it hard to change to a different distro due to the comfort factor/familiarity.

Must be something to do with my setup, otherwise the (Fedora) forum would be full of this problem.

I got the same problem: just installed FC3 on my Toshiba Satellite A129SP, Celeron 2.4ghz 256ram and so. I avoid the LVM partitioning that is proposed by default (i use typical ext3 and everything else) 'cause it make machines infinitelly lacky. I tried disabling unnecesary services (almost all) and disabling selinux but it stills slow. I tried lots of another distros on my laptop and it flyes, so it's not a machine problem...

oh! i forgot.. i dunno why it get stuck a while when it boots, screen shows a message like this:

Uncompressing linux...OK booting the kernel. (normal, its ok)
audit(*a long number here*); <-- ???!!! wtf is this!

Explanations? please?

You didn't by chance install any new drivers did you?

On the subject of fc3 running slow. I have monitored my machine for a week and not experienced anything odd like run away processes or process hogs. In fact its the opposite. When you first start a program the process runs with normal priority and everything but it seems like it doesn't get the lime light but is running with about 3%-7%(max) and is not at the top of the list. It will run for a sec then go away then come back and run for sec. Like I said no process hogs so I stumped.... I decided to update my version of fc3 using up2date and it took all night and into the afternoon before it finnished. When I rebooted the computer is running fast again! I have no clue on why it is doing this.... One day it seems it likes my hardware and wants to play nice then the next it will start running slow again. But as of right now its running fast and will let you know if this changes and will keep looking for an answer to why this is happening!

***EDIT*** Note: gruiz001 kind of suggested this in an earlier post, though I think i can now say with confidence that this is the answer!

Hi everyone,

So I might have a solution. First i will describe what i witnessed so you can all cross-check with your problems.

I have a DELL Inspiron 5150, 512Mb ram, 2.4Ghz Hyperthreaded CPU.

When i first installed FC3 i noticed that nothing appeared to run. I would try to run a program from the dropmenu (say openoffice writer) and the following occured:
- hourglass mouse cursor would appear
- label would appear on taskbar (ie "starting openoffice writer")
- label would disappear
- hourglass cursor would revert to arrow

I never had the patience to let it "keep going", wash my car and see if anything had changed. so, i did some hunting and found people had a lot of problems with FC3 running slow during boot up after the 'udev' module was loaded.

now this module controls the logical partitions. You might have these if you used automatic partitioning during install. FC3 would have created some LVM groups. From what i have read, 'udev' is new in FC3 replacing 'devfs' or something like that from FC2.

So, ANSWER: do manual partitioning during install. Do not use LVMs, just ext3, swap, vfat if you want something Windows can read (dual boot).

Once I did that i have a fast-er FC3. I have nothing to compare it against, but put it this way: things load at what i would consider to be normal speeds.


If you need some help with what partitions to use, I guess i would suggest:
\boot ext3 100Mb
\swap swap (up to 2x your RAM, but at least equal to RAM)
\ ext3 (perhaps remainder of your drive)


that should get you up and running.

I would appreciate if someone can let us all know if this works. it may just be pure fluke that i now have a working FC3 system, and that 'udev' has nothing to do with it.