Re: X performance
From: Jean-David Beyer (jdbeyer_at_exit109.com)
Date: 08/16/03
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Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2003 15:48:59 -0400
Stefan Patric wrote:
> Ben on Friday 15 August 2003 18:42 wrote:
>
>
>> Hi all, My system is running Intel Pentium 500MHz with 80MB RAM. I
>> have NT4 and RedHat8 installed on my system. I noticed windows
>> performs much faster than X in RedHat. The applications takes a bit
>> longer to load under linux as compared to in NT. I use 160MB swap
>> space for linux. What seems to be the problem? Why is there a
>> difference in performance? And sometimes Netscape closes by itself
>> under my linux X.
>>
>> Any suggestions for improving performance?
>
>
> The first thing you can do is determine what background processes are
> running, and "turn off" those you don't need. Most Linux installs
> run, by default, at lot of CPU cycle eating stuff that a stand-alone
> or simple home network setup simply don't need or will ever use. This
> will also free up a lot of RAM, and that will improve performance,
> too.
I see this advice all the time, and there are good reasons to remove
unneeded processes from a system; the reasons are related to system
security - never to be neglected. But saving memory or CPU cycles are
not among the good reasons.
1.) If the process is unneeded, it will just go to sleep waiting for
something to appear in its input queue.
2.) The memory it nominally consumes will be reclaimed pretty soon as it
is paged out.
>
> Add more RAM. 128MB total would be good. 256 would be a lot better.
>
Certainly true for Red Hat 7.3. 64 Megabytes of RAM is definately not
enough. 128 Megabytes is acceptable. 256 Megabytes does not page
noticeably less. Red Hat 8or 9 may have increased memory needs.
A Pentium 166Mhz is annoyingly slow, but your 500MHz one should be quite
good (though not state of the art, of course).
Why not examine your paging rate. If it is less than about 2 pages per
second, more memory will probably not help. If it is over 25 pages per
second or more, you should surely get more memory.
>
> Running a lighter weight window manager like icewm or blackbox or
> desktop environment like XFce will help, too. (KDE and GNOME are
> memory and CPU hogs.) Besides its own apps, XFce will also run
> native KDE and GNOME apps, if the appropriate libraries are
> installed.
RSS for process X is 19 Meg on my system; 1.8% of one CPU.
RSS for process sawfusg is 3.944 Meg on my system; 0.0% of one CPU.
I.e., they do not seem to be CPU hogs.
>
> Switch to a different distro. One that is designed more for the
> single, stand-alone or home network setup than as a corporate server
> handling hundreds of users.
How would that help? Have the distributers diddled the optimization
levels for their programs to favor small working sets instead of faster
execution? Have they compiled all possible modules hard into the kernel?
Neither are likely.
Consider Red Hat Linux. Normally considered to be a "big" distribution
with lots of unnecessary stuff in it. But early in the installation
process you can select what gets loaded from the CD-ROMs into the hard
drive(s), and which of the daemons actually get started. So you could
make Red Hat Linux take up a small amount of RAM and hard drive space,
were you so motivated.
>
> Also, to improve hard drive performance, see if running hdparm does
> any good. 'man hdparm' in a terminal for more info.
>
Why not go all the way and run a bunch of 15,000rpm Ultra/320 SCSI hard
drives, one for each file system (partition)? ;-)
-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ Registered Machine 73926. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 3:30pm up 25 days, 20:21, 2 users, load average: 2.05, 2.13, 2.09
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