How Can I Improve Linux Speed

In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I 
loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K 
laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.

The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.

Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

Thanks for any help.

Please reply by email to [e-mail]

[Yang Xiao]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 14:04:29 -0600, [e-mail]
 wrote:
> In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I
> loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K
> laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.
>
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.
>
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Please reply by email to [e-mail]
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

The only thing I can think of with this setup is not to run the GUI at
all, but that obviously is not what you want.

Yang

[Aly Dharshi]

Donald,

The first thing that comes to mind is that of using a lightweight windowing 
system such as XFce, there are rpms available for FC2 all over the place.

Secondly, what sort of installation did you chose ? Laptop, Workstation etc 
etc, that makes a difference, make sure that you have all services that you 
don't use turned off, such as Sendmail, SQL servers etc etc.

I guess that the other thing that you could do is make some hardware 
improvements if you can. This means more RAM ! but before you go down that route 
try XFce and turning off services that you don't need. I don't know your 
experience level with Linux but you can also chuck packages that you don't think 
that you would use off the laptop. I suggest this as the last last last resort.

So your friends at the moment would be the rpm command, serviceconf in the very 
least and ps -ef for finding out what you are running.

Cheers,

Aly.

[Cameron Simpson]

On 14:28 31 Aug 2004, Aly Dharshi  wrote:
| 	The first thing that comes to mind is that of using a lightweight 
| 	windowing system such as XFce, there are rpms available for FC2 all over 
| the place.

Indeed. I was using FVWM very happily on a 233MHz box with 96MB of RAM.

| 	Secondly, what sort of installation did you chose ? Laptop, 
| 	Workstation etc etc, that makes a difference, make sure that you have all 
| services that you don't use turned off, such as Sendmail, SQL servers etc 
| etc.

Personally, if I have the disc space, I install EVERYTHING.  Then turn
some stuff off with chkconfig afterwards.  Anyway, aside from some load
at startup, having lots of services "up" shoulnd't matter much because
they will generally be idle, and thus swapped out. Of course, using them
will need them swapped in again and that's a performance hit at the time.

So I say: install lots, but disable the stuff you don't use.

| 	I guess that the other thing that you could do is make some hardware 
| improvements if you can. This means more RAM ! but before you go down that 
| route try XFce and turning off services that you don't need. I don't know 
| your experience level with Linux but you can also chuck packages that you 
| don't think that you would use off the laptop. I suggest this as the last 
| last last resort.

I hear anecdotal evidence that a faster hard drive will help (assuming
you have to do lots of I/O, which you may); laptop harddrives are often
quite slow; look for a faster spinning one (5400rpm is common now,
they use to be commonly 4200rpm) and better still a faster stepping one
(low seek times), as that's where the real speed cost tends to be imposed.

But:
    - run less stuff - this means not Gnome/KDE, which have rather
      heavyweight environments, in particular desktop managers

- avoid screen wallpaper - this costs RAM

- choose a lightweight window manager (eg XFce or FVWM or IceWM);
      I use FVWM, my girlfriend uses IceWM and lots of people like XFce.

- choose a lightweight desktop manager, such as the Rox tools:
    	http://freshmeat.net/projects/rox-filer/
    	http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/SoftwareIndex
      or of course just use lots of shell windows, which is what I do:-)

| 	So your friends at the moment would be the rpm command, serviceconf 
| 	in the very least and ps -ef for finding out what you are running.

I like "ps axf" myself.

Cheers,

[Paul F. Johnson]

Hi,
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.
>
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

FC works best with lots of memory. Windows also has a lot of stuff in it
from the hardware companies which call on funny things which speed
things up. Up the memory and it should fly better.

TTFN

Paul

[Macklin Stanley]

Sir -

You could try and use XFCE.  It a lighter weight window manager.
There is a really nice HOW-TO on FedoraNEWS.ORG

http://www.fedoranews.org/contributors/diego_figueroa/xfce/

Also, check out Cobind Linux http://cobind.com/ which is based on Fedora.

Good luck.

Regards,
Mac

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 14:04:29 -0600, [e-mail]
 wrote:
> In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I
> loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K
> laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.
>
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.
>
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Please reply by email to [e-mail]
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 15:04, [e-mail] wrote:
> In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I 
> loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K 
> laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.
>
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.
>
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

IIRC Fedora Core 2 has 128mb memory listed as a requirement, and in many
cases people here have said they were unable to even install with less
memory.

Many have said they have it working with 64mb, but AFAIK they are using
it as server and not running X on the machine.

With less than the recommended memory I would expect it to seem slow,
especially if running several memory hungry apps.
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Please reply by email to [e-mail]

[Tom Mitchell]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 02:04:29PM -0600, [e-mail] wrote:
> In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I 
> loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K 
> laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.
>
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.
>
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

The desktop can be slower for a long list of reasons.
Here are some common ones.

* lack of memory
  * IPV6 look ups being slow.
  * host name; DNS slow lookups.

The  W2K desktop environment is not as large (yet) as a full blown
X-window system and window manager.

First you should do some profiling to see what is really slow.

Is the system still trying to finish basic background (cron) tasks?
     "top" can tell you what is going on.  Let the box run for a couple 
     hours... once a week.... we can tidy these tasks up later.
     see prelink,  slocate.cron, logwatch, anacron, makewhatis.cron
   Are you running out of DRAM?
     If so try a smaller set of default daemons 
     (chkconfig --list | grep on).
     Try a lighter weight window manager/desktop.
   Are IPV6 lookups slow?  
     If so turn them off (most of us just should turn them
     off... see the archives for how.
   Are you having trouble resolving localhost?
     localhost and basic network connectivity is expected with X.
     If this is not correct fix it.

Here are some simple tests that can help us help you (timing results
on my box for reference).

# top -n 1 | grep ^Mem
    Mem:    515848k total,   455440k used,    60408k free,    13612k buffers

# time host `hostname`
    Box.mydomain.com has address 192.168.0.51

real    0m0.250s
    user    0m0.004s
    sys     0m0.011s

#  time host localhost
    localhost has address 127.0.0.1

real    0m0.041s
    user    0m0.008s
    sys     0m0.002s

# time host 127.0.0.1
    1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer localhost.

real    0m0.052s
    user    0m0.002s
    sys     0m0.008s

# time perl -v
    This is perl, v5.8.3 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
    ... 
    real    0m0.034s
    user    0m0.001s
    sys     0m0.003s

# time xterm  -e date

real    0m0.890s
    user    0m0.077s
    sys     0m0.023s

[John Thompson]

[e-mail] wrote:
> In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I 
> loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K 
> laptop.                                                       ^^^

I'm hoping you meant 64M, not 64k!
> The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.
>
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.
>
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

The gnome desktop is pretty resource-intensive.  Try something lighter 
like XFCE (http://www.xfce.org; XFCE packages are included with Fedora 
Core2, if that's what you're using).

You can still use gnome apps with XFCE as long as the gnome libraries 
remain installed; you just don't get the resource-intensive desktop and 
eye-candy.