Why is my machine so slow?
The old machine was a 233MHz P-II with 64MB RAM.
It used to run W98/IE, no virusware. It wasn't fast, but menus and other popups generally appeared in a basically natural way, so I didn't feel like I was waiting for them all the time. All I had to do was track down and delete a virus once in a while. Now I have a 500MHz K6-2 with 128MB RAM running Slackware(Zenwalk)/XFCE/Firefox. It's DOG SLOW. Firefox menus are slow, saving files is slow, Thunderbird newsreader is slow. So the cpu is twice as fast, twice as much RAM, with OS, desktop, and browser that are all supposedly faster, and yet the mouse motion is still more herky-jerky than with the old M$ system. I have too much confidence in *nix software to believe this is normal. Is there some misconfiguration that's creating a bottleneck somewhere? Would a different kernel help? This crappy performance is very frustrating, and I would very much like to fix it. Any help or ideas are welcome. |
The same thing happened to me when I first installed OpenSuSE v10.1 a few days ago. When I first installed it the GUI ran unbelievably slow. I fixed it but I'm not sure exactly what happened. I have an ATI Radeon 8500 AIW card so I ran the installation for the drivers from ATI. The computer ran MUCH faster after that. The interesting thing is that /etc/X11/xorg.conf isn't really set correctly to run the ATI driver. I'm not going to change it, though. I don't need OpenGL or hardware acceleration so I'm leaving it as it is. I'm running the 2.6.16 kernel.
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Could you post stats from top or uptime? Top will show what resources are being used, top processes and load average all on one screen. It updates every 10 or 15 seconds automatically.
uptime will show how long the system has been up, and load averages at that moment in time. Load averages will tell if your system is really working or not. The load average rule of thumb is 2.0 and below is okay. Sustained periods above that and your system will show signs of a slow down. (load average is synonymous with a line at a movie theatre. With 2 in line you'll get farily quick service. The more you get above 2 the longer your wait will be. Only load average represents the processes waiting in line for CPU service.) |
128MB RAM is a little light these days. When you run top, what processes are consuming the most CPU, and memory (hit 'M' to sort by memory usage). Firefox with a typical set of plugins and extensions typically uses 50+MB resident, 150MB total memory. I'd say RAM is probably the bottleneck.
Comparing Win98 to Linux on that hardware is not really comparable. Compare Vista, since the functionality is approximately comparable. Yes, operating systems have gotten quite bloated. The reason is because of the incredible drop in the cost of processing, memory and storage. I still remember buying for my home computer: 16K of RAM for $275, 10MB HD for $1000 and a 200KIP computer for $2000. For many computers, 512MB of RAM is under $50 these days. Unless you are doing embedded system design (and even many of those have more resource than your machine), it's not worth spending the time fighting to optimize for a constrained environment. |
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X 13-15% misc. other apps 6% or less OR firefox 33% thunderbird 21% X 12% etc. Quote:
top says there's about 5-7MB free memory, 111M used out of 118M total. Load is around 1 or less. Quote:
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seems quite inappropriate, even on a machine with those specs. Quote:
Also check for errors in /var/log/ and dmesg. Quote:
is whether DMA is enabled or not. Cheers, Tink |
nevermind ....i was to slow.
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top - 21:15:52 up 11:37, 2 users, load average: 0.63, 0.66, 0.57 Quote:
This is only a sample. There are about 30-40 attempts total: Code:
Sep 11 20:03:49 zenwalk sshd[2790]: Failed password for invalid user admin from 202.57.35.38 port 47669 ssh2 Quote:
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Half your memory is in swap. That will slow you down rather considerably. To check for DMA (direct memory access) on your disk drive, as root:
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# hdparm -v /dev/hda hdparm -d1 /dev/hda |
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2109 dan 15 0 140m 51m 13m S 1.8 44.6 53:49.09 firefox-bin 128MB ... that explains the performance and the CPU usage. Quote:
attack. If you don't like them filling up your logs, have a look at this post Cheers, Tink |
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Thanks for all the help.
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