Linux crawls on 2.8Ghz,256mb RAM
 

I recently installed Red Hat Linux 9 on my system and installed all the features.However my system is running pretty slowly.I click on the various programs and it takes about 20 secs to start loading.

On my windows XP,programs start almost as soon as I load them.

I wonder if the speed of Red Hat Linux can be increased by any means(stopping unnecessary processes etc.).

Any help will be greatly appreciated.Thank You.

Hyup - in terminal type "top" to see what is running. There is also a gui resources tracker in the main menue somewhere.

www.mjmwired.net may still have a RH9 tweeking page under "resources".

Listen: you should know that RH9 is an old old distro.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=437396

Hi,

You should use 'hdparm' to check if your harddrives DMA is enabled. (if you have an IDE drive).

I think it is installed per default, so you should be able to launch from a terminal (as root).

Lets hear how it works out.

regards,

sometimes something hipri gets in a mode where it eats a lot of time, and using top is difficult. to assuage the situation, login in as root and enter
nice -n -12 top
you can kill or kill -9 the pid of the busiest process, but this could have bad side effects depending on what it is. but experimenting could determine if you have the right process. i have seen various hi pri processes become overly hungry due to bugs, etc. case in point is acpid occasionally running out of file handles on suse 10 on my inspiron 3500.

Just for reference, I have one machine that's a PII 400MHz with 256MB and it's nothing like that slow even if I (occasionally) run GNOME

In other words, it's not an issue with RH9 - more to do with the HW.

Have you tried the suggestion?

I just wanted to point out the fact that you have 256mb of RAM on a 2.8GHz system ...what a waste.

Also, I have heard a lot that redhad is slower then most distro's do to it's microsoftish like need to run a bunch of crap in the background. Get slackware.

Sorry if I just pissed off a bunch of Red Hat users, but it's true.

regards,
...drkstr

Which Distibution?
 

Thanks for your replies.In your opinions which distro do you recommend that I should get?

All I need is for it to be fast and if not equal better than Red Hat Linux 9.Which is the latest version of Linux available?

Slackware runs very fast. It was designed around the core linux principles and is one of the most native Linux distros out there. The only problem you might run into is the fact that it it a little bit more advanct, and you might need to spend a little time learning how to do things. Red Hat is nice in the way that it does a lot of things for you without you realizing that it's doing it (one of the reasons why it can be slow). Luckily for you, the official slackware forum is right here on Linuxquestions.org.

My best advice would be to do some reading on slackware and find out if it is right for you before you switch over.

regards,
...drkstr

I tried running hdparm on the teerminal and it says command not found?

Just for reference, I have a PIII 550Mz 256Meg laptop, and it ran RH9 fine forever.
Couple of months back, tossed that out and put Ubuntu on - also no issues.

Sorry if I sound too newbish but what is HW?

Probably a pathing issue - try /sbin/hdparm.
Else "su" first.

You were right.It has weird side effects when you run it as root.Sometimes nothing bad happens.Sometimes it just closes windows and sometimes it says that it cannot be stopped.

Anyway Thank you for the suggestion.At least I learnt a new command(nice)

/sbin/hdparm works but I cannot understand anything which pops up on the screen.What is this actually for and what does it have to do with the computer speed?

Thanks for your help.