performance sucks (at least mine does)

[Duane Attaway]

>From my experience, KDE and Gnome love to munch on memory like a game
pacman.  Try running "top" in a shell to see what's going on.  Note how
much memory is loaded into swap.  Press the "m" key to sort everything by
memory usage to find the culprits.

Start killing the offenders and watch everything else speed up.  Watch out
for unhappy children processes and their screaming parents.  Chances are
you didn't need most of that stuff running anyways.  Unused services can
be turned off in the runlevel scripts, which also starts them at boot.

Your 500MHz processor should be performing about 1 BILLION instructions
per second, which should be noticed on the screen.  If not, there's
something very, very wrong. I am currently running everything on a P133
with 16MB of RAM and its very fast for me under X and twm.  If I still had
a working 486, I'd love to show everyone they can be fast too.  A 486 was
blazingly fast a decade ago and they still can be mighty fast now.  I've
grown up from 2MHz 6502 processors from an Apple II, and I thought the
graphics and text was fast on that.

There should be no reason why a computer today that is well over 1000
times faster with more than 10,000 times as much memory cannot keep with
its older brethren.

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, "Marvin "GodfatherofSoul" Bellamy" wrote:

> My home computer is terribly slow running KDE.  I didn't notice this
> until I compared with a similar machine at work which is much faster.  I
> assumed at first that the AMD chips was just slower 500 K-6 VS 450 PII.
>  Well, I just tested a 200 Mhz Pentium machine at work with KDE and it
> also beats my machine at home (both with Slack 8)!  Anyone have any tips
> on diagnostics that I can use to figure out what the hell is going on?
>  The only real difference that could account for my poor performance on
> my home box is IDE VS SCSI.
>
> Home box (custom) AMD K-6 500Mhz
> SiS530 intergrated graphics
> 192MB RAM
> 256MB swap
>
> I even compiled KDE from source, without much effect, but it did speed
> up a *little*.  On the plus side, I'm much more impressed with how fast
> Linux runs when it's set up right.

-- 
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