Hi all,
First off, let me say that I am a long time user of Slack, and prefer it to most other distros I have tried, but out of curiosity I thought I would give Ubuntu a go just to see what all the hype is about. Have to say I am impressed. OK, it uses gnome by default, and while I can see the appeal, I personally prefer KDE. What impressed me the most though, is the speed of it. For instance, from power button to desktop takes about 45secs, while with Slack it's maybe twice that long. Then launching apps is much quicker than I have experienced under Slack, i.e. Open Office takes less than 20 secs under Ubuntu, where it takes maybe a minute or more under Slack. Similarly, Firefox loads in less than 10 secs under U, but takes more then 30 secs under Slack.
Anyway, to the point of my enquiry, while I am not going to change from Slack, mainly due to just how stable it is, how do I get it to be more responsive like U is. I have a custom kernel, compiled for desktop use, dma is enabled, and once a program is open, it runs as fast as I would expect it to. It really is just startup times.
Can anyone shed any light on this.
TIA

What window manager are you using in slack? I seem to recall reading that KDE loads a lot of components at its start up in order to speed up application launch later. If you are using fluxbox or xfce under slack, the lag time might be due to the need to load the components that are already loaded if you are using KDE.

The same article that I recall saying that KDE "pre-loads" components also said that gnome did not. So, I have no ready explanation for the difference between slack and ubuntu.

I also need to say that I am not an expert on this stuff, so I could very well be way off base.

For comparison, how long is boot-to-X, without including KDE into the equation?

KDE easily doubles bootup time on any machine I've tried it on -usually more.
To get a good comparison make sure are running the same window manager, DE and program and check the startup times for the program. The only valid measurement is to run after a fresh bootup finishes(if you kill and restart the same program without rebooting it will load from the cache which may give variable results)

If you still see a significant difference in startup times, then the difference most likely comes from having different kernel options/size and Ubuntu may be using pre-linking which can make lots of difference.
Startup times are another story which involves the boot scripts which are completely from Slackware.

This is a bit strange as I've seen the exact opposite speed results. Apps start much faster for me in Slack than Ubuntu.

It really depends on a lot of factors. Each system is configured so differently that it's impossible to say what's causing the bottleneck.

Yup, my boot up to the command line is slower on Slackware, but programs load and run faster in my experience. Gnome and KDE take about the same speed to load on Ubuntu and Slackware, XFCE starts a bit faster on Slackware and I haven't compared other window managers.

But it is mostly subjective really.

What does pre-linking do, and what are the up and downsides, considering that it appears not to be used in Slackware?
Do you have any more insight to share with us on this? Googling on re-linking just gives a lot of compiler options, which doesn't really give me much without a proper context..

-Y1

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu doesn't run ldconfig and fc-cache at startup as Slackware does, that takes a few seconds.. Just edit the scripts and it'll be faster

Here's a link...
http://crast.us/james/articles/prelink.php

I've played with it. Personally, I didn't think it was worth the trouble.

Yeah, disabling the ldconfig and fc-cache during boot speeds up Slack's boot time.

You can run them manually if and when you need them.

I usually switch them to rc.6 (the shutdown script) to make sure they always run. ldconfig is so critical, I would be hesitant NOT to run it...

What I do is move ldconfig in rc.M *before* the call to rc.inet1, and let it run in the background. As long as /lib /usr/lib /opt/kde/lib and /usr/local/lib aren't in a network file system, everything should be all right.

Also, hotplug is slightly faster in -current (and when/if Pat drops hotplug for a pure udev system, and upgrades to a newer Udev, everything will be *much* faster).

sounds like something is misconfigured on slack. firefox only takes something like 5-10 seconds max to load from scratch on my laptop (1.5ghz pentium m). 30 seconds sounds like way too long. are your hdparm options set?

I don't run it on startup or shutdown at all. I do however make a point of running it whenever I install or upgrade software as libs may be added or changed. Otherwise I'm pretty sure it's not necessary to run it every time the machine is booted. Either way, I've never run into a problem doing it that way.