Hi all,

As somebody who nurses old hardware along as long as humanly possible, I think I've noticed that each Slackware release is just a bit slower each time.

Here's the (anecdotal) data:

The computer is an IBM A22m Thinkpad. It has a Pentium III 11 GHz processor and half a GB of RAM. I generally stay with a 2 GB swap partition.

I bought it used in 2006. I immediate replaced the 20 GB hard drive with a 250 GB hard drive.

I also put Slackware 11 on it (after a brief flirtation with SUSE).

Since then, I've upgraded to each new version of Slackware -- sometimes doing an upgrade, and sometimes doing a clean installation.

Over time, here's what I've noticed:

1. Slackware 11 ran very quickly.
2. The 12 series also ran quickly. Kaffeine did an exceptional job playing DVDs.
3. With 13.0, I noticed an almost imperceptible slowing, and Kaffeine wouldn't play movies well at all. They were very jerky. VLC did much better.
4. 13.1 felt pretty snappy, even with KDE's Akonadi, Strigi, and Nepomuk running (I wanted to test those technologies to see if I like them -- I didn't).

However, now with 13.37 on the same hardware, it is slower. VLC still does a good job with DVDs, but everything else seems slower.

• The MySQL daemon really seemed to slow things down. I turned it off after I disabled Akonadi and the computer did get more responsive.
• I wasn't able to get my old udev method for enabling the Thinkpad scroll button, so I tried a method using xorg.conf.d. It works, but seems really jerky. I need to experiment it bit more on that topic.
• Having two separate users in X at the same time is okay. Having both of them using Firefox 10 (just installed in the latest patches) is excruciatingly slow! This was never a problem with earlier versions of Firefox or Slackware.

I realize that I'm dealing with impressions and not hard data. Have any of the rest of you noticed a gradual slowing over time?

And please don't turn this thread into an anti-KDE thread. That's not the point. I regularly bounce among a number of WMs (Wmaker, KDE, and TWM being three of my favorites). The trends I'm noticing are for six years of Slackware all on the same equipment.

Any thoughts?

Regards,

It may be a question of how you frame the issue.

Pentium 3 is 13 years old this month, according to Wikipedia. Meanwhile, software has grown with the technological advances in chip and buss speeds. There's nothing lean about MySQL, while software, even Linux software, has become more demanding.

I used to run Slackware 10 on an IBM PC 300 (first-generation Pentium). It could play audio, but the chip could not do video.

Linux is friendlier to old hardware than that other OS, but there comes a time when old morphs into too old.

4 members found this post helpful.

Akonadi is using a lot of resources along with strigi and nepomuk, but that's only the beginning when it started to index all your files. Once it done, it's no longer use too much resources

talking about udev, that's not Slackware's fault. It's the upstream that changes most of the behaviour. Actually it's not just udev, but also other applications

about other apps, IMHO it's normal to have higher specifications as new features are added on every new features.

Try to install Slackware on quite modest hardware and it will run very fast

For mysql, I don't know if you already use my.cnf config file
but for less resource usage:
cp /etc/my-small.cnf /etc/my.cnf

Just thinking that we claim Slackware (desktop?) to be i486 compatible ...

That thing really make senses in A.D. 2012?

As u said , its hard to measure theses things. I don't agree that the DISTRO is getting slower, but i agree that some software keeps raising the requirements of computer power. I use current, but i have 2 friends that still uses 12.2, and they don't have old machines.

If this really troubles you , u could try some kernel tuning.The other thing that can really improve the system performance for sure its services tweaking, but as u talked about MySQL, u should know this.

You could, if u have time, do a clean install with only the necessary. I did this once in a old Sempron laptop, only for office+internet+small_games with XFCE and the result was clearly faster then the default install.


And if ure a pessimist maybe whats getting slower is not Slackware, but ur old computer. Hardware components die too.

Just curious. Why such a huge swap partition?

Hi,

You can only push hardware so far. There is a time to either revert to usable version for the hardware or replace the hardware with something that can handle things.

Sure it is nice to be able to tweak everything out to the nines. Sometimes you just have too accept the fact that hardware can reach a limited use.

One size doesn't fit all! Slackware versions are not slowing down. It's your hardware that cannot keep up!
Your processor is limited along with memory being a small footprint as compared to today's leading edge hardware.

“A tool is but the extension of a man's hand and a machine is but a complex tool. He that invents a machine augments the power of man and the well being of mankind.” - Henry Ward Beecher

“Men have become the tools of their tools”- Thoreau, Walden

3 members found this post helpful.

Good question. I recall reading somewhere that four times the physical RAM is a good swap size. FWIW, though, gkrellm doesn't usually show a lot of swap usage.

By the way, my IBM laptop is far from unusable. It's still fast enough for my needs. I recently composed a 3,000 word magazine article on it while simultaneously having Firefox open with multiple tabs for my research -- all in KDE.

But the latest software does seem a bit slower than older versions.

Regards,

What filesystem do you use?

I think that used to apply back when RAM size was small (less than a 1G). I think now a days, swap space that large is just a waste of space. My opinion of course.

Your laptop sounds like it is still perfectly usable. For an older unit I would use XFce or Fluxbox. Your unit will function very well with 1 Gig of swap(or less). You can free up some HD space that way. I recommend that you try that on the next install. You will not notice a decrease in performance.

JFS

That's what I use.
If you feel like it try lowering the size of your swap file. It will work.

You know, that really depends upon what the OP is doing and how the OP is doing it.

For example, if the OP is doing something that requires a lot of space on the /tmp directory and the OP is using tmpfs for /tmp, then a large amount of swap space would be a Good Thing.