Would a new laptop run Slackware noticeably faster?
 

Hello:

My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 with 3 gigs of ram and a Intel Centrino Duo processor.

I am installing Chromium through SBOpkg - it is now over 2.5 hours and it is still installing!

Would a newer PC make that much difference to this and just running Slackware 13.37 in general?

Thanks for any thoughts on this,

If the PC is faster and has better resources to draw from any OS can be faster as long as the hardware can be supported.

Maybe I should look into a new PC - over 3 hours now and Chromium is still installing...

Hi

Short answer is : no, you won't see much of a difference.

You will gain a few nanoseconds here, maybe a second there, but nothing really significant.
Did you see how Windows XP run as slow on today's top of the line Core i7 as it ran on a Pentium II 233 MHz ?
Ok, not really as slow, and you might say "It's Windows" ;)

You might gain a bit more responsive desktop, more comfort using your computer by switching to a multicore CPU, but even that is not sure.
Nowadays performance bottlenecks are 1) the harddisk and 2) memory size. For 1) you could go for a SSD at the expense of disk space. For 2) you can already see that 3Gb is adequate.

Granted, a more recent PC might have a faster CPU, and compiling big programs can benefit from it, but that's about all.
By "big program" I mean long to compile like Chromium, LibreOffice or a full KDE. Even the linux kernel don't take long to compile on computers like your laptop.

If you have no other need for change than speed, I think it's not worth the hassle.

You'd better make your decision to change based on other criteria, such as better display (size, resolution, LED backlight ...), better graphics card (NVidia or ATI discrete chip) or better connectivity if you are considering a new laptop: today's laptops come with webcam, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi all integrated, and even USB3 and Bluetooth are becoming available on entry level laptops.

Personally, I only change when it breaks. Last time, I replaced my 5 years old (broken) 2GHz dual-core by a 3GHz quad-core and ... I still wait for applications to launch and web pages to load :(
I can run more VM simultaneously, but I don't do it much anyway.

Just my 2 cents

Cheers

Thanks cendryon - what a great, and useful, reply! :)

Chromium is installed: 3 hours & 16 minutes!

Hi Robert,

My dell inspiron 9100 w/ 2GB ram and duo 2.8Ghz cpu's (Pentium 4 HT) and it took about the same -- 3hrs to build.

Solid State Drives are decent (yet expensive) but a good SATA III 6.0gb HDD 10000rpm fairly much will do the same thing for less money and last longer.

As far as RAM goes, just get the maximum amount the PC can handle with the fastest speed supported, and see if it also support Dual-Channel.

Also, make sure you get the best CPU your PC can get also.

However yes, long time frame compile programs... will take a better part of the day to build regardless of system. For about every MB you add you increase the time to build by about 1.3x.

17 minutes to compile and install the chromium SBo package.

I have a AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1100T Processor, 8G of RAM, Slackware64 13.37. I edited the Slackbuild to add a "-j 5" to the make invocation. (No, I don't know why I didn't add "-j 6" to use all 6 processors at once.) No ramdisk used; LVM partitions on software RAID-1.

Compiling on a RAM drive and not a HD will speed up your compiles a lot. Your 3GB should honestly be enough. But if not, then more RAM will make it possible.

You could always, create a RAMDisk if you have the space in your Physical RAM and use the system RAM as disk space and compile from there. You'll have to save stuff to your HDD if you reboot or unmount the RAMDisk, but it's a good option of you have enough RAM in your system to spare.

You can safely put -j 9. I have 1055T and it works great. Someone, somewhere said that you can safely use nuber of cores x 1.5. Try it, it's like a breeze :)

While there are good reasons for purchasing new hardware for performance boosts, a long compile time for complex pieces of software on a commodity laptop is not one of them.

The easiest way to get chromium (or really any other software) working is not to compile it, but use a pre-built binary. Google maintains a repository of daily chromium builds that you can get from here (32bit) or here for 64 bit. Just navigate to the latest build directory, and download the 'chrome-linux.zip' file there.

Now, extract the zip file to a place of your liking (I like to keep mine in /home/klickback/soft), and run the 'chrome-wrapper' binary that will run Chromium and also generate a 'chromium.desktop' file in
/home/klickback/.local/share/applications/ and a Chromium entry will appear in your KDE or Xfce menu. Copy that file to your desktop if you prefer a desktop shortcut.

If you want to upgrade Chromium, just download the latest zip file and extract it where you previously did. No more compiling for hours ;)

All this is assuming you have installed the packages mentioned here.



Now, if you get a new laptop, you will certainly see some performance benefits - slightly faster boot times, faster software compilation, etc, but do not expect anything ground-breaking unless you compile software or do math or heavy graphics work a lot.

Ultimately, it depends upon how much time and money you can spend on the new gadget - I said time because the new laptop will also have its quirks that you will need to solve or get used to.

PS: Chromium compiles slow on your machine does not mean your machine is slow - it means the browser is too complex ;)


Cheers.

I tried that once with a kernel compile on my desktop system, and was surprised to find it made no appreciable difference. I think it might have been because I was using ext4 with delayed allocation and the virtual filesystem cache kept everything cached in memory anyway. Either that, or it was simply that the disk access wasn't the bottleneck on a dual core2 machine running a make -j 3. I certainly didn't see much in the %iowait column during the build.

Robert

Please note that there is a difference between compiling software and installing it. you chose to use Chromium by downloading a SlackBuild script from http://slackbuilds.org/ and compile the source into a Slackware package.

The installation of that package (after 3 hours of compiling) takes only a few seconds, right?

That is why you could also search for pre-compiled Slackware packages (just make sure that you download and use a package from a trusted packager) which will save you from waiting for a compilation to end.

Eric