CPU performance problem on old laptop

[Konstantin Svist]

Hi all,

I'm investigating slowness on my old laptop (HP ze4400, circa 2004; see 
related thread "hdparm shows poor performance on cached reads for PATA 
drive" if you're interested).
Apparently the HD cached read speed is not the only thing that suffered 
a performance hit.

I ran nbench (http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html) on the laptop 
and got the results that showed that the performance is roughly half of 
my newer laptop (Dell E1505) - which was very surprising, since the new 
laptop is not THAT much more powerful than the old one (plus, I'm pretty 
sure the test didn't use both cpu cores on the new one).

I decided to try nbench in knoppix environment - and to my surprise, it 
performed nearly as well as (and in a few tests, better than) the new 
laptop!!
I've ran the same test on the new laptop in knoppix - and found that the 
results weren't affected all that much.

I've also tried nbench on the old laptop in runlevels 3 and 1: 3 gives 
same performance as 5, but 1 gets somewhere in the middle between 
knoppix and F8/runlevel 5.

What should I investigate next, to find the cause?
What do the results so far suggest? I'm guessing some part of the 
problem is the services that start up in init 3/5 - and perhaps the new 
kernel can be partially blamed, as well
Has anyone else experienced a problem like this? What can be done about it?


TIA

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