My system is
AMD 1GHz 384MB RAM running on a Gigabyte Motherboard
GeForce Ti4200 128mb running with latest drivers from nvidia


Hi.
I installed Mandrake 10. 5 months ago.
I have tried every single thing to make it faster
From hdparm to enabling 3d acceleration
setting up a hostname, tried everything been 5 months now i have tried to fix this slowness.

First of all it seems like its constanly refreshing itself
if I set the taskbar to auto-hide it actually lags for it to hide and come back like refreshing frame by frame. A screen saver is actually slow... Tux Racer is slow, Opening up a Konqueror window is slow.

It appears that its KDE that is slow as hell.
or something to do with the Nvidia drivers that i didnt configure correctly which i doubt because if I Put the same thing on RedHat 9 everything run smootly.

Even watching a DVD is slow,
as soon as there's a bit of cpu usage it gets slow as hell, DELETING a 4.7GB file is long!
it takes about 30min to untar a DVD Image which in windows would take 2minutes

Dragging a window around is making my computer run slow..

If anyone can help me with that problem that I have been trying to fix for 5 months now, searching on forums and all I tried everything I saw on forums nothing seemed to make it work faster .. actually not faster but just Normal operating speed would be good, like Windows XP for exemple. which runs like a saucage on a waterslide so fast it is.

Any help would be appreciated.

1) How did you "enable hdparms"?

2) Did you edit /etc/sysconfig/harddisks

3) What does "free" report?

since you were screwing around with hdparm, check what opjose said.

also, check in Mandrake Control Center->system->services. see what services are running & stop unneccessary ones. use the info buttons to find out about them. MDK starts up several resource hogging services by default (syslog, apache (if installed), fam, & several others i can't remember right now). if you're unsure of what to disable, please post here what's running & i'll give you some help.

and, you didn't mention how large a /swap partition you have, or if you indeed made one. if you didn't, or made it too small, that can drag things down to a crawl.

otis

Ok well the Hdparm are set to according to a website ive checked before, about hdparm, and enabling udma 32 bit
everything is set as according to the website. which i forgot the link. but it is configured correctly.
and yes I edited my harddisk file uncomment everything that needed to be uncommented

and what do u mean by free reports?..
and yes i might have a couple of services running, and i dont know which one to disable, but Im pretty i could find out which ones, but i dont know how much of an impact of performance simply disabling some services would have with my mandrake installation, running extremely slow, I'm posistive it has something to do with my NVIDIA drivers, or kernel, i dont know, but they are installed.

Im having trouble understanding why my taskbar runs so slow just to auto hide, it eats up all cpu usage.. running mozilla is almost impossible...

I will post my services that are running on my system as soon as i get home, im currently at work.

im still open to any more suggestions to fix this problems, but im pretty sure it has to do, with my video card drivers. or something..
thanks for the help

"free" (without "quotes") is a command to show all memory usage......... cache, swap, free, allocated, buffered. open a terminal as root & type........ free (hit enter).

opjose wanted to know how much memory you have & how much is being used.

otis

Bear in mind that what you may read on other web sites may not be optimal for Mandrake.

You should not issue any hdparm commands in /etc/rc.local or other files as is often suggested and instead use /etc/sysconfig/harddisks to do this for you...

Quote:

and what do u mean by free reports?..

otish1000c stated what I wanted.

You do have a somewhat minimal amount of memory for KDE so I want to see what your resources look like before proceeding.

Post your output here.

Quote:

and yes i might have a couple of services running, and i dont know which one to disable, but Im pretty i could find out which ones, but i dont know how much of an impact of performance simply disabling some services would have with my mandrake installation, running extremely slow, I'm posistive it has something to do with my NVIDIA drivers, or kernel, i dont know, but they are installed.

Many services are big memory hogs, others may even slow the system down greatly (such as CUPS) when they are misconfigured.

Eliminating any unneeded and not configured services is a good step AFTER the graphical drivers are check out...

Quote:

Im having trouble understanding why my taskbar runs so slow just to auto hide, it eats up all cpu usage.. running mozilla is almost impossible...

This sounds as if you are NOT using the accelerated graphics drivers, but instead are reverting to the Vesa Frame Buffer drivers which are extremely slow by comparison.

You haven't stated exactly what you mean by slow...

e.g.

"Launching an application takes XXX seconds before anything appears" (Mozilla is NOT a good example because it loads so much additional "junk" into memory...)

Or

"Taskbar slow to auto hide."

The latter is a completely different problem!

Quote:

I will post my services that are running on my system as soon as i get home, im currently at work. im still open to any more suggestions to fix this problems, but im pretty sure it has to do, with my video card drivers. or something.. thanks for the help

Not to be facecious, but if you are pretty sure, the question would not need to be posed right?

Don't rule anything out. Relatively small items can have a big impact upon performance.

E.G. Your system may be spending all of it's time swapping to hard drive which you perceive as slowness, when in fact it's operating "properly" for what you have provided to Linux.

Better to tackle the problem with all the possibilities open so as not to overlook anything.

Alright Here's the report I got from typing *free*
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 385840 297832 88008 0 12136 117012
-/+ buffers/cache: 168684 217156
Swap: 506008 186536 319472

-- Now for the system services
I checked and didnt have that many, maybe less then 30, I stopped syslog and CUPS for now.

No difference for now, but I didnt reboot yet..

For exemple on how it is slow, well the system itself is not slow, my internet connection runs well, lets say my computer just freshly booted If i open up Konqueror it will take 2 seconds and its up, but while it comes up the window is brought in 4 pieces, 1/4 of a window at a time, while i think it should bring it up in one shot, even to minimize a window same problem, MInimizing takes 100% cpu usage.
I really cant what the problem is, Swap, Video, or whatever. If you guys need any information on my system or perhaps the content of some configuration files, let me know.

When konqueror comes up with the delay, is your hard drive constantly going?

Also does this happens if you close konqueror and restart it again immediately?

Does exactly the same thing occur with the 1/4 pane being opened at a time?

Yes everything is loaded slowly, any windows I open up or minimize is being loaded in seperate part frame by frame, even tho i just reopen the same program imediately
..

May I also add that any flash animation would take all my cpu usage.. as well as any stupid banners that pops up.

- When konqueror comes up with the delay, is your hard drive constantly going?

- If you click on the HOME icon on the desktop AFTER closing out Konqueror does the same thing happen?

Go into "Configure your desktop" and then Konqueror Settings.

Under Web Browsing/ turn OFF "Scan for new plugins at KDE startup"

Also turn off "Enable Plugins Globally". Click APPLY.

Then under Java and Javascript turn off "Enable Java Globally" and click APPLY.

Under Cache, turn on "Use cache whenever possible.

Hit apply and exit the program and log out of KDE.

Log back in and see if things have changed at all.

Alright, I did everything you told me to, and rebooted
no difference has been made..
I dont think there's something we can do about this problem unfortunely. Everythiing is visualy slow, I even wonder why I Play Doom 2 and its not playable because its so slow. Flash animation are running slow as well, i dont think my computer slow enough to have that kind of performance, I dont even dare trying UNreal Tournament 1.

On one hand what you describe tends to indicate that you are not running accelerated 3D drivers.

On the other hand you can get Doom 2 to run which contradicts this.

Therefore it may well be that you do have the correct drivers installed but that they are running in PCI versus AGP modes.

You may want to look at the output of "X --probeonly" to see what is happening.

(You must kill the DM service first with "service dm stop")

thats exactly IT
when I look up my drivers it says PCI and AGP
for some reason
and NO I cannot run DOOM 2 at all its so slow
i dont know whats wrong but it does say PCI and not aGP and I got TI4200 128mb Nvidia
so if u can please tell how to fix this id appreciate
thanks

There are two approaches...

You can use the Linux AGP drivers for the chipset on your motherboard or you can use the nvidia AGP drivers.

The nvidia agp drivers are installed when you install the NVIDIA_kernel-2.6.3-7mdk-5336-6mdk.i586.rpm file provided on the "OFFICIAL" 10.0 CD's (they are NOT on the community).

These should have been installed along with the NVIDIA RPM's provided.

Then there an entry in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file under

Section "Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NvAGP" "3" <--- sets the AGP data rate and driver

There is more info on this in the NVIDIA documentation...

If you have a fully supported motherboard chipset usually the AGP driver is automatically loaded by the kernel...

On my Intel Base motherboards intel-agp and agpgart are automatically modprobed at startup....

You haven't said which chipset you are using, but the newer kernels do provide agp drivers for via, etc. (for NForce you need to move up to 10.1).