I want to make my LE2005 top box run faster by disabling some services but don't really which one I should do. I have also tried to disble every feature in Konqueror like searching for pluging,at startup ..... etc.....

My setup is P4 1500MHz with 1G RAM. I own a couple of ATA100 hardrives but not sure the kernel supports ATA100. How do we run a test to see if kernel support ATA100.

Despite I have 1G of SDRAM, computer eats up about 200M after a fresh reboot and quicly comsumes to about 700MB with only couple of firefox browsers open and other 2 superkarambe liquid-weather and sysmonitor.

My question is: Are there other tips to make it run faster?

You could always try running a lighter Window Manager like Fluxbox or Xfce. I prefer Fluxbox, but they're both very nice and MUCH faster than KDE! You can give Fluxbox a try-out (if you want to) by downloading the Knoppix-STD distro - it runs Fluxbox (and is also a very handy live CD!).

J_K9

You can recompile your kernel. That made my boot severely faster, and it will load less drivers into the kernel, making the machine faster.

Hi,
Forgive me if this is obvious but, you do understand that Disk Cache and Application memory will consume nearly all your available physical memory? This is normal is nearly all OS'. Do you mean to say the application memory is at 700mb? Did you try doing a 'top' in a console? Track down the process that is acting up by pushing 'M' when running, also use 'P' to see what might be hoggin the CPU. It may be a bad build/rpm for the guilty application. This happens now and again. Had a bind server that was using 99% CPU one time! Just a bad build though.


Late,
Kyle

You can also disable services that you don't really need. This usually results in quicker boot up times.

in a console type :

to see whats eating up all the RAM

as i run debian/Etch and i have a P4 1.7 with 256 RDRAM and it runs very fast

The memory as I see on the information page reports that disk cache is mostly used compared to application data. Thus making a total more than 50% of 1G RAM. I don't know if this is normal operation on most system. Also, I wonder if I install on a system that has only about 128 or 256MB of RAM only, should I raise the amount of SWAP? I haven't noticed that my current system with 1G RAM is using any SWAP though.

Regarding about bad built application, this is not the case since I report the situation after a fresh install without any other software except Beep Media Player and Firefox.

Running other ligher windows managers is not what I intend to do. My system hardware is not that bad though it's not at the top of the line either. I run KDE that comes with LE2005 and I must say that I am gonna stick with it.

I have also tried to shut down couple of services. such as bluetooth, dund, hidd, hotplug, mDNSResponder, netplugd, nifd, oki4daemon, pand, postfix, rawdevices, udev.

I also try to disable "Show window content while moving/dragging" and it does help a lot since for some reason 2D acceleration is really bad with my AIW 9800 ATI card.

I know that my system runs OK not like "really fast" under LE2005 if I have to compare with Windows XP. I will loose the look if I have to in order to gain for the performance such as button animation, drop shadow, animated menu, etc..... I want to find out if there are still other tips, methods in order to really boost the performance of LE2005 since I really like this distro.

Thanks for reading this long and chiming in your wonderfull tips

This sounds very interesting but risky though. Is there a wonderful information page that just shows how to do it? I'd love to find out.

Have never recompiled mine, but recompile.org looks like it could come in handy!

J_K9

It is... on EVERY current OS. MACOSX Windbloze (all versions) etc. Did you happen to notice this on your previous version of Linux? It was the case then too.

By the way, mandrake makes an explanation of this in their help files, just for this reason (ON KDE). Go to [from menu]->System->Configuration->KDE->Information->Memory. Then click on the 'Help' button. This might help my credibility (BTW, I am a computer engineering student, late in my program, maybe that could help).


Also, only raise your SWAP file/partition if it appears that there is too much SWAP being used. A better rule for this is to get more memory if too much SWAP space is being used. There is a generic idea that one should have double your memory in swap space, but I cannot verify that with any specifics.

Risky, but it sure makes your machine rum

Here is how I learned how to recompile the kernel:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Compiling_a_kernel

I also study computer engineering (in the beginning of the course thought), so what would be the reason for this common behavior?

It optimizes the access time for I/O. Every time you go across the bus to memory instead of the CPU registers it is costly, it is even more costly to go across the bus AND access from the Harddrive. Thus, things are cached in RAM as RAM is quicker than Harddrive. (but registers are the best place to store data, but they are limited. You will learn all this when you take assembly languages).

I have not implemented the Disk Caching paradigm as I have not done much OS programing..... yet. But, this is the concept. Also, this is encapsulated to the software engineer, as it is handled by the OS. However, the memory management is STILL a huge issue for the software application engineer, and disk I/O and Memory I/O should be avoided when possible.

I have 10.2 installed on a P3 500mhz with 320MB RAM and it works fine, boots in less then a minute. Also you can boot into failsafe and run fsck to optimize your disk.