I'm a long-time Slackware user. I started with Slack 3.0 in '96. My main home machine is now getting a little old: 1.0 GHz PIII, Matrox Millennium II with 8MB, and 768 MB RAM. I currently have Slack 12.2 on the machine and have now put 14.1 on it as well with an eye toward a complete upgrade. (The machine also boots NEXTSTEP 3.3 and Win 2000. It is difficult to get newer hardware that is supported by NEXTSTEP. I also have a PII overdrive with similar peripherals and the same three OSs that I also sometimes use.)

My problem is that X11 in 14.1 runs poorly compared to X11 in 12.2 on my PIII machine. (It even seems to run more poorly than X11 in 12.2 on my PII overdrive machine.) Xfce in 12.2 is almost snappy; windows drag without tearing in Xfce even with compositing on. On Xfce in 14.1, windows tear and flicker if they're dragged around, while KDE is completely unusable.

To improve the situation, I've recompiled both X11 and Xfce with SLKCFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -funroll-loops -ftree-vectorize -mno-sse2 -mfpmath=sse" and then turned off compositing in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

With these tweaks, Xfce/X11 in 14.1 runs almost as well as the stock Xfce/X11 in 12.2. On all my installations, including both 12.2 and 14.1, I always recompile the kernel, aggressively tweaking it for performance on my specific hardware.

Does anyone have any ideas for improving performance of X11 on 14.1? (I've tried LXDE and e17, but they're not enough faster than Xfce to fully compensate.) What else should I look at? Are there any benchmarking tools to help me pinpoint the bottlenecks?

As time goes by so software goes too, it get more complex, and "faster" if the hardware is newer. People doesn't seen to care about the good "old" hardware that still in use around the world, so they code for newer hardware.
But im sure that hardware you have could do much more if new code was wrote for that(the world is mad).

Now a hint to improve the performance of your system. Have you thought about way lighter GUI ? What about WMs instead of DEs ? Here some lights about "size".

I have used WMii, Blackbox, DWM, Evilwm, but the one that really gave a clear difference in speed is FLWM(Fast Lightning Window Manager), very simple WM but very fast and small memory footprint.

Careful to don't stress your good old hardware with those new software, they aren't wrote aiming that kind of machine.

Regards

Just a thought... since more modern X systems rely much more heavily on the graphics system and you said you experienced "tearing" and since the Matrox card (though OMG! it was a breakthrough in it's day )is PCI, isn't it possible your pIII system has an AGP slot, perhaps just begging for a video card with more than 16-32MB ram?

Also, though I have no idea what Nextstep can address, even if max on your mobo is only 1GB, that last 256MB can make a substantial difference in feel for the other OSes. I'm guessing that when you hit X on Slack14 that the hdd is solid thrashing, trying to provide swap!

PS - I have a p4 system w/ only 768MB ram (it's RAMBUS so Im not upgrading that!) running Slack14 and it never tears and is reasonably spry, but it has an AGP FX5200 video card w/ 128MB DDR VRAM. So the system ram is secondary to the graphics system IMHO.

Consider that 768MB system ram is roughly 50% to 25% of quite modern systems common complement, but 8MB VRAM is way less than 10% of common modern graphics systems. Add to that the extreme bottleneck, at least for graphics, of the pci bus.....and, well it should be obvious now.

Yes. With 768 MB of RAM XFce will lag on your machine. I would give Fluxbox a try. It does not have the bells and whistles that XFce has, but, it will run faster on your hardware.

There is not always newer Xorg is better for old items.May be it's configuration matter?

"(I've tried LXDE and e17, but they're not enough faster than Xfce to fully compensate."

What?

You want to say that openbox+lxpanel+pcmanfm combo aka LXDE /about 2mb in packet/ is slowly that XFCE . Impossible.
It's as if I claimed that console is slower than windows :-)

The simplest IMO is change Matrox Millennium II with 8MB for something better say 16 or 64 MB second hand for maybe 3 cents now.

Best..

Agreed. I paid $50.00 for my main Slackware box; it is a used dual core unit with 2 GB RAM. It runs XFce very well. If Openbox or Fluxbox does not work it may be time to buy a newer used box.

As said in another thread some tweaking of /etc/X11/xorg.conf works wonders, sometimes, especially on older systems. I was able to boost the X11 performance of an ancient laptop this:

- Make sure, that you have hardware support in your X configuration, instead of some frame buffer mode without hardware acceleration. To this end check, what driver is used in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and kick out anything with a name starting with "fb" from the section "Driver".
- Ensure that the horizontal synch fits your monitor. Look for a line that reads "HorizSync 30.0-50.0" or so in section "Monitor".
- Most important: Add a line for your video ram: "VideoRam 8192" is for video adapters with 8 MB (8192 kB). Without this line X11 may use just 1 MB. In the case of my old laptop this gave a HUGE boost in X11 performance.

Not sure, if this helps you as much as it helped me, but it might be worth a try.

As a side note, Xfce should run well as such on your system, as long as you don't open too many big applications at the same time. 768 MB is not sooo bad. My laptop has only 384 MB, and I can use Xfce quite well on it. E17 might even be better, but currently my standard environment on my old laptop is FVWM-Nightshade.

Good luck!

gargamel

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for this info!

Regards

Thanks everyone for all the fast replies.

@enorbet & hitest: I'm pretty sure that the system RAM is not the bottleneck: kinfocenter reports that after application data, disk buffers, and disk cache, there's still 60 MB free. No swap space is being used at all. In any case, the board is maxed out at 768 MB, so I can't add more RAM.

@enorbet & gargamel: The Millennium II graphics card is AGP and that section of xorg.conf reads

Section "Device"
Identifier "Millennium"
Driver "mga"
VendorName "Matrox Graphics, Inc."
BoardName "MGA 2164W [Millennium II] AGP"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
VideoRam 8192
EndSection

Since the machine needs to be compatible with NEXTSTEP, the best I could do is look for WRAM upgrade to take the card to 12 MB.

@BratPit: I think you misread my post; I didn't say that LXDE or e17 weren't faster than Xfce, but rather that their increase in speed over Xfce didn't make up for the greater decrease in the speed of X11 itself. In any case, I like Xfce because it is configurable enough to make up for my poor eyesight in locating buttons on windows, and so on.

I do have two much faster boxes that are all Slackware, but the goal is to keep this triple-boot PIII machine (and hopefully the triple-boot PII machine as well) running as long as possible. I do most of my compiles on four- or six-core AMD boxes that boot multiple versions of Slackware. (Hence the -mno-sse2 flag in the SLKCFLAGS.) A kernel compile that takes more than an hour isn't much fun and something like Firefox is ludicrous to compile on a PII or PIII.

I must say that even with 12.2, the PII machine is fairly fast. It also doesn't swap and it only has 256 MB of RAM.

It's still a puzzle that X is so much slower than it used to be. I wonder if one of the other extensions should be disabled in addition to compositing. I do understand that programs do tend to get slower as more development goes on, but I didn't expect the magnitude of this decrease. Perhaps I could go back to earlier versions of X (and perhaps Xfce) and rebuild for 14.1.

1 members found this post helpful.

If there is too little ram for big display there is other 2 solutions:

1.

There's an option called "Agp aperture size" in your bios

...if there is in bios???

2. Change color depth of display in xorg from 24 to 16:


or something like this:

Modes - should be yours too.

3.

Try to play with some options in mga driver

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/...an4/mga.4.html

if gets better after switch off compositing

check in log if DRI is working

try adding the line:
to the Device section that references the video card in xorg.conf.

Hope it helps

BratPit, in both Slack 12.2 and 14.1 I run with Depth 16. The monitor is 1600x1200 native. I've played with the AGP Aperture size in BIOS, but I notice no effect. DRI does not work in either 12.2 or 14.1. I've tried nearly all of the options, including Option "OldDmaInit" "On", Option "NoHal" "on", Option "ForcePciDma" "on", and Option "AccelMethod" "EXA". That last option results in a segfault, leaving no console, necessitating a reboot.

It seems that only turning off compositing has any appreciable effect. Sigh. (Turning off compositing in 12.2 makes Xorg very fast, by the way.)

By the way, I've now built and tried the FLWM window manager and the EDE desktop. Both are fast, but in both of them, windows still tear on moving and when opening new windows, the progressive draw on the screen is noticeable. It's somewhat disturbing to see how slow Xorg has become (assuming that it IS Xorg that's gotten slower). NEXTSTEP is lightning fast on this hardware and everything on the screen has to go through a PostScript interpreter!

So

Like I said, getting ready for 3 cents to spend :-)
either you'll like console.

Check yet vesa driver with some limitation in resolution and no 3D but may be....

Best..

Again, I doubt, that X.org as such is your problem. I am still pretty much convinced, that it is something in your setup that causes the delays, because my old laptop is half as powerful as your system, with a Pentium III-M at 700 MHz and only 384 MB of RAM, and on my laptop windows don't "tear". Your hardware is better, and therefore should be faster.

I am running out of ideas, if it's not something like a FrameBuffer being used instead of a native Matrox driver with hardware acceleration. If I was in your shoes, however, I'd fall back to a really mean trick that I used at the time when Xfree86 was popular (before X.org was forked off it) and when I did not feel like learning how to set up X. What I did was definitely not Slackware-like, but I didn't even feel ashamed because of it, as in the end it helped to get things working on my Slackware boxes. So what did I do? Believe it or not: I used another distro (SuSE at that time) and had it set up X11. Then I copied the result over to Slackware --- and it worked.

So you might also try some other current (live) distro to see, if the problem is related to X.org as such or to your specific configuration in your Slackware system. And maybe that other distro can create a working /etc/X11/xorg.conf for you.

Just a (certainly somewhat absurd) thought.

gargamel

Came to me one more thought.
Long ago there was some performance problems with /proc/mtrr.

Quote:

On Intel P6 family processors (Pentium Pro, Pentium II and later) the Memory Type Range Registers (MTRRs) may be used to control processor access to memory ranges. This is most useful when you have a video (VGA) card on a PCI or AGP bus. Enabling write-combining allows bus write transfers to be combined into a larger transfer before bursting over the PCI/AGP bus. This can increase performance of image write operations 2.5 times or more.

Compare

from 12.2 and 14.1

Good idea! On 12.2, with the 2.6.32.39 kernel, I find

while on 12.2 with the 3.4.24 kernel, it is
and on 14.1 with the 3.10.25 kernel, also
Now, on 12.2, no matter the kernel, X11 performance is very good, much better than on 14.1. It doesn't seem to be the problem.