Hey guys,

I am running this configuration:

MSI K7N2 Delta2
Athlon 1900 XP
896 MB DDR 2700 RAM
GeForce4 MX440 64 MB Albatron Nvidia video card
60GB maxor HD 5400 rpm - where SuSE resides
200 GB maxor HD 7200 rpm- where all data resides
Generic DVD Rom IDE
Generic DVD burner IDE

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I plan to re-install SuSE. But I would like to know what suggestions you guys may have to optomize my hardware, and installation so that everything is tweaked, and snappy as possible.

I am doing this because, at work I run VMware on a IBM thinkpad, that has

Pentium IV 1700
1 GB RAM

and the SuSE installation that is running on VMware seems so much quicker than my installation at home.

What could I do to ensure the most tweaked installation so that SuSE runs quick and snappy? Is there benchmark program for linux?

Firstly, go online and install the online updates, especially for the kernel (at least kernel-source). There were a few latency issues when SuSE 9.1 was released, which have largely been fixed now.

The most effective way to increase speed is to recompile your kernel. You'll find pleanty of detailed instructions on how to do that on this forum and on www.tldp.org. You could try playing with the compile options in the Makefile (eg. -funroll-loops tends to give faster resullts) but note that that may make your system less stable.

Install the accelerated nvidia graphics card driver. I think you can do this from YaST after recompiling the kernel (you will normally lose it if you recompile the kernel). Otherwise, you'll need to download it from the nvidia website and follow the instructions.

You should then identify what your main bottleneck is. Start up all the programs you're likely to be running then take a look at the memory and swap usage; if you're using swap then you can increase your speed by creating creating a second swap partition (or a swap file) on your second disk. Another parameter in this case is the value of swappiness (search LQ for swappiness); this trades off responsiveness (eg. the time between a mouse-click and the program reacting) for efficiency (time taken by programs to perform complex calculations).

If you're not using your swap and have enough free memory, then you might like to investigate the possibility of using a tmpfs filesystem for your /tmp directory. This will create all temporary files in memory instead of on disk, slightly speeding up several programs including KDE. (See http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ght=tmpfs+Ftmp)

As for benchmark programs, there are several. Try www.freshmeat.net.

rjlee-

Yeah, I have a swap partition that is not even being taxed at all, have the current drivers and updates from SuSE, and still the bottleneck is there. I cannot figure where it is coming from?

Firstly, the Athlon XP 1900 only runs at 1.6GHz, which is slower than the Pentium IV. Athlons tend to produce more performance per lock cycle (hence the bigger number), but actual performance depends on the code being run.

There are a lot of things that could be causing this bottleneck. Make sure that any services you aren't running are turned off in YaST (or better yet, uninstalled). Make sure that you have DMA enabled on the hard disks. Compare the speed of the RAM on the two machines; is the thinkpad using DDR?

Also note that programs tend to take longer to start the first time after rebooting, because data has to be loaded into memory.

you could also run hdparm to optimize your hard disk settings.

"60GB maxor HD 5400 rpm - where SuSE resides
200 GB maxor HD 7200 rpm- where all data resides"

You can run faster by accessing two hard drives in parallel. If the two hard drives are on the same cable then place them on separate cables. Add more partitions and try to balance your hard drive I/O load between the two hard drives.

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Steve Stites

yeah i've tried the hdparm, and it seems to be at the best settings 32bit etc...
oh and DMA is enabled...

i'm gonna turn off all services i dont need next, and see what happens there...

Stopped serveral services (ldap, iptables, and others) seemed to help...

just looking for any other ideas that could help optomize settings in SuSE

I just thought about maybe it is because I am running KDE apps in Gnome...

I know Gnome has to load a bunch of KDE "stuff" , so that could be another reason why I was lacking or thought I was lacking in performance....

Is there anyway to check for bottlenecks in my installation?

Someone told me PCLOS had a tool that would help, but they forgot the name of it...

any ideas? i may go to Debian or Gentoo because of their hardware support...