Hiya,
I seem to have a memory problem, or should I say my 2 computers do.
Suse 8.2
Motherboard Asus A7V133, A7V
CPU AMD Duron 800, Duron 800
RAM 768 MB 1*512 2*128, 640 MB 1*512 1*128
RAM = PC133 (all)
swap 256MB, 256 MB
HD 30 GB, 30 GB
Graphics Elsa 32MB on both
SB Live on both
Both with linux only, boot GRUB
Both have lastest respective BIOS

They are slow. I just (2 months ago) removed winME from both which ran much faster.
I have tried going with the std size swap that the SUSE chose, then cut it down to 512 MB, now half of that. When working with Open Office documents (300KB avg) or PDF (1MB) files in Adobe, you can literally see the machines thinking. Any changes, take years
to implement. And they both rely heavily on the swap, I hear the HDs working like mad.
I was no slouch with win and had it tweaked pretty good, But I am lost now.

I have read so many document about this, and the norm seems to be swap = RAM * 2, but that was no better.
Linux supports all my hardware.
My latency is correct. I believe my Bios is correct.
What can I do now?
I know Linux runs on a 486 and should be like lightning on these machines, so how do I get at least the performance I had with winME?

Any pointers in the right direction would be good,
Thank You in Advance,
JS

Ahh, I have a crystal ball, and it says you have your SB in PCI slot 2, move it to PCI slot 3, that's the 3rd one away from the AGP slot.
If I'm wrong, well, it was worth a shot. I see nothing wrong with your hardware (specification wise), I had a A7V with an Athlon 1Ghz that just buzzed along. But heres another tip, if you load "Everything" from a distro set of CD's, and activate everything, you will drag you're machine down fast. Take a look at 'ps -ef' and see what that's telling you. Also, run 'top' in a console window while you're doing those PDF files, etc, and see what's 'really' doing all that CPU intensive stuff.
Hmm, now that I'm thinking about it, Linux did have a problem with those built-in promise controllers, but I thought that was all solved. Take a look at the man page on hdparm, and look at what your HD's are doing.
That's about it in my bag o' tricks.

Thanks for the reply. It looks like I installed OOffice as "single user" on both machines, that may explain why I cannot remote print?

But I read about the slot two problems and have both SBs in the last slots.

Top, and ps are quite interesting! Top tells me when I open my OpenOffice that the CPU usage is as high as 98% (it is looking for dictionarys that it never finds) after about 3 mins it settles down. if I open a browser it stats "x" at 46% for about 5min.
Top also tell me that I have
94 total 2 running, 91 sleeping, 0 stopped, and 1 zombie!
eek, I have a zombie in my computer?

I think today I will re-install with minimum installation then add things as I need them. I did have a "full" install because I thought I might use this or that.
Thanks for the help,
JS

Hi Ravenmoonheart,
Please come back and post how your reinstall went, and if it fixed anything. True, software looking for things that aren't there sure do mess things up. Ya really don't have to do a 'minimum', try 'standard' or 'desktop' 'internet station', stuff like that, depending on your 'distro'.
But yes, please come back and tell us your results.

Nope,
I have tried no swap, swap=ram, swap=2*ram
I Have tried reiser partition and ext2
I have tried small partitions and large

I have to admit not putting everything on does speed it up a bit, but openoffice is just not as fast. too bad, I did not want to use billy's software to process data.

Sounds like DMA isn't enabled on your harddrive. This can bring even the fastest machine to a crawl.

Do a - hdparm -tT /dev/hda (replace /dev/hda with w/e drive)

and post your output. If its really slow, you need to enable DMA.

Search the forums for how to enable it, its not hard at all.

No doubt a bad DMA setting would drag the system to the ground, but that would affect the 'whole' system. It's worth a try. As far as OO is concerned, I did a google search for 'suse 8.2 openoffice slow' and came up with this,
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-May/4726.html
, and you are not the 'only one' having this type of problem. You might try a diff version such as 8.1 or diff flavor like Mandrake 9.1 and see if that does the trick.

Thanks for the ideas.
The DMA on the HD is okay, I am running is alone on the ATA100 bus, with my cd and cdr/w together on the std bus.

the link seems to describe my problem alright, it was faster with Suse 7.3
hmm, maybe I can wait for a bug fix?
right. lol
Thanks for the help.
JS