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fuqqer
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Joined: 21 Jul 2002
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Location: Boulder CO - USA

PostPosted: Sun Jul 21, 2002 7:15 pm    Post subject: Gentoo==Slow as molasses. Reply with quote

I just installed Gentoo on my Dual PIII 1.1 GHZ Box with 768Megs of memory. I ran the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS with "-D__SMP__ -O3" optimizations. That's TWO underbars after the D and SMP. My box is (a LOT) slower than my PII 200 MHZ laptop running Slack 8.1. What the hell is going on? I have a RIVA TNT2 videocard w/ 16 meg ram.

Any Ideas as to why this might be? I definitely compiled the kernel with SMP support...Could it be the high security options that Gentoo comes with for the kernel? I don't even know where to start looking. Once a program is running, it moves right along for the most part. But starting a program takes forever.

It takes more than a minute to start gnome or kde... That just plain sux. I also have a billion use options in my make.defaults folder.

USE="3dnow apm arts avi berkdb crypt cups encode gdbm gif gpm gtk imlib ipv6 java jpeg kde libg++ libwww mikmod mmx motif mpeg ncurses nls oggvorbis opengl pam pdflib png python qt qtmt quicktime readline sdl slang spell ssl svga tcpd truetype X xml2 xmms xv"

ARCH="x86"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"

Thanks for any help...-Jake
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StifflerStealth
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Joined: 03 Jul 2002
Posts: 968

PostPosted: Sun Jul 21, 2002 7:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Other ppl had the same problem until they set the hostname in the hosts and hostname files.

check this post out for more info:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=1706

Good luck
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 21, 2002 9:42 pm    Post subject: slow ?? Reply with quote

(Hell- it would take two minutes just to read all the use flags

- thought that look-up problem was for an app to start, not before Desktop
window manaqer was running ? I got the same thing, about the one minute
to start GUI slightly faster starting Flux rather than KDE
Same lag, but not a Dual w/3 times the RAM !!
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 21, 2002 9:51 pm    Post subject: me too Reply with quote

4 got to add once GUI starts, apps load time not too bad, ( not real y speedy, old
linux version took roughly the same) and guess things run fast enuff
It is just that go have a coffee before the GUI starts that gotta be F/U
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fghellar
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Joined: 10 Apr 2002
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2002 4:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

This slowness can be caused by not having dma enabled for the hd. Try running hdparm -tT /dev/hda (or whatever your hd is).
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2002 4:51 am    Post subject: slow GUI loading Reply with quote

Fghellar

Thank you for suggestion - will try to decipher hdparm useage,

in interim, my results are 128 MB in 0.49 seconds=261.22 MB/sec
64 MB in 2.88 seconds

Any idea what these results tell, have seen something that leaves
impression DMA is enabled ( in menuconfig maybe ?)
unfamiliar w/hdparm no optimizations have been attempted
(if not broken, do not fix attitude ?)

For other than loading GUI mode, other operations that must be drive
intensive appear satisfactory, if not yet optimal.
Compile time, or large copies are very fast.
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fghellar
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Joined: 10 Apr 2002
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2002 1:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Your numbers look ok...

1. Are you using the low latency and/or preempt in the kernel?

2. Try a search for "hdparm", it will show up many threads related to system speed. Maybe one will help...
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Naan Yaar
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Joined: 27 Jun 2002
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2002 1:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fixing up /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname may help as noted above. If applications take a long time to load, you can start them using "strace <appname>" to see whether you can detect where they hang in a system call.
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dioxmat
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2002 2:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

try /sbin/hdparm /dev/hda and see what you get.
multcount should be on
IO_support should be on
using_dma should be on.

also, try looking if you're actually using SMP or not. cant help you with that, dont have a smp setup, but I guess top should tell you this.

try looking if you memory might be the problem. free will tell you how muc memory your system is eating, if you're using swap, etc...
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delta407
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2002 2:58 pm    Post subject: Re: Gentoo==Slow as molasses. Reply with quote

fuqqer wrote:
My box is (a LOT) slower than my PII 200 MHZ laptop running Slack 8.1. What the hell is going on?


What, exactly, is slower? X? Everything?

Well, it's not your disk, since you're pushing 260 MB/s across the IDE bus. It's not SMP support in the kernel, since if you had it disabled you'd still have one 1.1 GHz CPU... weird.

Maybe you have some runaway process... how much idle CPU time does 'top' show?
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