Hello all. I am new to the linux world. I have been using Red Hat 7.0 for the last year or so just to get my feet wet. I recently installed Suse 10.0 on a Dell Poweredge server I have and it seems to be running slow. It will take about 5-7 seconds to open anything and whenever I move a window I get trails(think winning at solitare in windows). When I had RH7 on this machine it was much much faster. I searched around and can't seem to find anything that helps. Any ideas? Please keep in mind I am new and not familiar with CLI.

What are the specs of the machine?

could also be something as simple as a graphics driver. If you did a full install it may be trying to load things you don't need. if you don't need the GUI you could change your /etc/inittab runlevel to 3 instead of 5 and text your way around (that'll geek you up). Should be much faster.

Its only a couple years old. pentium 4 2.0 Ghz, 512 MB ram, standard video card, thats all i can remember offhand(not at home). I'm using gnome with no other programs open.

im also using suse 10 (fully updated) i assumed the 7 second pause was just another downside to linux is this not normal?

1.6 ghz pc 512megs of ram (internal video card)

i'm not sure. maybe its normal with Suse but i doubt it. RH7 was lightning fast and it was much older. Im thinking Suse isn't configured correctly somewhere. It auto detected all my hardware during install, maybe it took the minimum settings to ensure workability and that i can tweak things to increase performance. If that makes any sense at all. I also checked in YaST and the system is set to optimal performance. I hope there is a way to correct this, as Suse is soooo much better and easier than other distros ive used. Keep in mind i am CLI weak. Thanks

Its not normal. Suse is very snappy on my laptop and desktop. I suspect your problem is hardware related or a configuration problem but I can't pin point exactly what it is.

I got the exact same type of behavior from SuSe 10 on one of my workstations. I had used SuSe OpenExchange for a mail server at one job, and decided to try it as a workstation. I thought I really liked it, but decided to delete everything off of that workstation and install Slackware. On the same exact hardware I went from waiting 5-7 seconds for apps to load with SuSe, to just a second or two for the same apps to load with Slackware. I don't want to put SuSe down, but I'll definitely be staying with Slack on my workstations.

I've got 9.3 (I'm thinking of switching distros, hence the outdated-ness) and I have a somewhat similar problem. From my understanding, SuSe is a bit of a resource hog ram-wise, and a full install I think would cause a general slow-down. I'd suggest looking into what all you have installed, and what all you use, and trash what you don't need (just make sure to use Check Dependencies ). If that doesn't help, look into your config files and see about setting them up a bit better.

Also, check your boot log, and the log you get from starting your GUI. I know with both I have many errors, and I'm sure that would cause a fair bit of slow-down, so look into all that as well.

hmm...interesting. thanks for all the feed back.

don't know if this will help:

linux:/home/markus # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515784 436204 79580 0 57984 177948
-/+ buffers/cache: 200272 315512
Swap: 72252 3184 69068

-----------------------------------------------------------

linux:/home/markus # fdisk

Usage: fdisk [-l] [-b SSZ] [-u] device
E.g.: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first IDE disk)
or: fdisk /dev/sdc (for the third SCSI disk)
or: fdisk /dev/eda (for the first PS/2 ESDI drive)
or: fdisk /dev/rd/c0d0 or: fdisk /dev/ida/c0d0 (for RAID devices)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

top - 01:03:53 up 4 days, 11:43, 2 users, load average: 0.85, 1.13, 1.15
Tasks: 83 total, 3 running, 80 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 19.9% us, 0.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 79.4% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 515784k total, 438096k used, 77688k free, 57984k buffers
Swap: 72252k total, 3184k used, 69068k free, 178252k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
32001 markus 15 0 62496 13m 9028 R 18.0 2.7 0:03.27 gnome-terminal
5743 root 15 0 63312 55m 7164 R 2.0 11.0 20:43.32 X
6584 markus 15 0 57684 11m 9184 S 0.3 2.3 0:05.19 mixer_applet2
32061 root 15 0 2108 988 764 R 0.3 0.2 0:00.04 top
1 root 16 0 692 260 224 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.39 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.13 events/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 khelper
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
9 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
327 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.23 kblockd/0
362 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
363 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.36 pdflush
365 root 17 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
364 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.90 kswapd0
955 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
1167 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.05 reiserfs