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scott_karana
n00b
Joined: 06 Mar 2004
Posts: 28
Location: GNU's Not Linux
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 Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:22 am Post subject: Horrible Performance |
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I've been jumping from distro to distro these days, and at the moment, I've left my dualboot to return to pure WinXP. Performance in each distro, Gentoo included, was crap. I tried Fedora 1, Debian by a netinstall, and Gentoo with gaming-sources, ck-sources, and various 2.6.4 kernels that I patched and cowpiled by myself. Using Fluxbox was only a marginal improvement over KDE and GNOME, and Firefox ran worse than IE used to on my older Windows box, which I first started using Firebird on. I had no additional processes running in the backround, other than xmms  yet I could almost count the seconds whenever I clicked a button in Firefox. I've got 128MBs RAM, and decided to make a 512MB swap, which I thought was generous. I have a Radeon card too, which should explain some of the speed issues. My ram was consistently at about 120MBs used, which I can only assume means Gentoo wasn't using the swapspace excessively. What gives??
EDIT: I compiled everything from a stage 2 install of 2004.0. |
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Duty
Apprentice
Joined: 15 Nov 2003
Posts: 253
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:41 am Post subject: |
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Free RAM is a bad thing. It means your OS isn't caching as much as it could.
I don't know what your problem is, though. Sorry for the bad luck! If you ever reinstall, prelinking is quick and cuts down on load times. |
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scott_karana
n00b
Joined: 06 Mar 2004
Posts: 28
Location: GNU's Not Linux
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:50 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | My ram was consistently at about 120MBs used |
Having only 8MBs RAM free is BAD? Jesus, I'll have to keep that in mind. ;d |
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Boris27
Guru
Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 562
Location: Almelo, The Netherlands
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 7:20 am Post subject: |
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What are your CFlags? If they include -O3 , that might be it. O3 makes large binaries, and those will fill up your memory quickly. Also, prelink. It helps.
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we are microsoft, lower your firewalls and surrender your pc's. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. your culture will adapt and service us. resistance is futile. |
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Boris27
Guru
Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 562
Location: Almelo, The Netherlands
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 7:20 am Post subject: |
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What are your CFlags? If they include -O3 , that might be it. O3 makes large binaries, and those will fill up your memory quickly. Also, prelink. It helps.
_________________
we are microsoft, lower your firewalls and surrender your pc's. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. your culture will adapt and service us. resistance is futile. |
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neenee
Veteran
Joined: 20 Jul 2003
Posts: 1786
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 7:24 am Post subject: |
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| scott_karana wrote: | | Quote: | | My ram was consistently at about 120MBs used |
Having only 8MBs RAM free is BAD? Jesus, I'll have to keep that in mind. ;d |
please read what Duty posted - he did not refer to 8mb ram at all.
he just mentioned that unused ram is of no use; linux caches as much
as possible in your ram, giving many new users the impression of it being
a resource-hog, which just isn't true.
as long as linux is only using your ram and not swapping excessively, all
is well. linux does not have the problem of needing as much real free mem-
ory as possible - due to auto-allocation, it can use ram for more useful
things than just keeping it on hold till some application needs it.
having a radeon card should not account for performance-issues, unless
you were trying to run 3D hardware accelerated software / games and
you were using old drivers or simply have an old card.
in short: too bad your linux-experience was not what it could have been.
good luck with windows. |
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Bastux
Guru
Joined: 15 Dec 2002
Posts: 369
Location: France - Paris
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 8:54 am Post subject: Re: Horrible Performance |
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| scott_karana wrote: | I've been jumping from distro to distro these days, and at the moment, I've left my dualboot to return to pure WinXP. Performance in each distro, Gentoo included, was crap. I tried Fedora 1, Debian by a netinstall, and Gentoo with gaming-sources, ck-sources, and various 2.6.4 kernels that I patched and cowpiled by myself. Using Fluxbox was only a marginal improvement over KDE and GNOME, and Firefox ran worse than IE used to on my older Windows box, which I first started using Firebird on. I had no additional processes running in the backround, other than xmms yet I could almost count the seconds whenever I clicked a button in Firefox. I've got 128MBs RAM, and decided to make a 512MB swap, which I thought was generous. I have a Radeon card too, which should explain some of the speed issues. My ram was consistently at about 120MBs used, which I can only assume means Gentoo wasn't using the swapspace excessively. What gives??
EDIT: I compiled everything from a stage 2 install of 2004.0. |
maybe you forgot activating hdparm, I forgot it too, my computer was very slow, I didn't undersand why |
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kaput
Apprentice
Joined: 23 May 2003
Posts: 197
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| Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:06 am Post subject: |
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| Boris27 wrote: | | What are your CFlags? If they include -O3 , that might be it. O3 makes large binaries, and those will fill up your memory quickly. Also, prelink. It helps. |
I think that some people assume "more cpu optimizations = faster system." I don't think that's necessarily the case and I think many Gentoo users would agree (as Boris27 seems to). My system is compiled as -Os, which means there are less *cpu* optimizations than -O3 or -O2. However, the binaries are smaller (*size* optimized) which means apps load faster. Things aren't as "optimized" for actual run-time once the binaries are loaded, but my system feels almost twice as responsive and I haven't noticed *any* run-time slowdown. YMMV. |
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