[TriLUG] My slow linux machine

[Magnus Hedemark]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, James McDermott wrote:

> I am running RedHat 9 on a Micron Millennia Mme box that has a 233 Mhz 
> procesor, 256 MB RAM (Max Allowed), and an IBM 6.4 GB Ultra DMA /33 IDE 
> hard drive. The machine only has linux installed (no windows, no dual 
> boot).

Before I start, it's important to have realistic expectations when dealing 
with older hardware.  Your memory cap may become an issue, and your hard 
disk is certainly going to be a performance bottleneck.

> When I start an application, it takes considerable time to load the 
> application. Mozilla(1.2.1) takes about 8 seconds, GIMP(1.2.5) takes 
> about 15 seconds, OpenOfficeWriter takes about 25 seconds. The system 
> monitor is showing that memory is using about 246MB out of 250MB and 
> swap is using 29MB out of 510MB.

If you install the systat package you can run "iostat -x 1" and see what 
your hard disk utilization is like in real time.  Though I imagine a drive 
that old might be loud enough to give you an audible indication as to 
whether or not the disk was thrashing.

> I think that my problem is that I am a slow linux machine because I am 
> CPU bound?
> 
> What is the recommended CPU speed to get decent performance? I would 
> like to see OpenOffice come up in less than about 5 seconds.

Note that the applications you're starting are known hogs.  On my P4 OOo 
starts up rather slowly.

Check this out... FC2t1 ... 383MB RAM, 1.5GHz P4 
Mozilla - 5 seconds
Gimp - 6 seconds
OOo writer - 12 seconds

Note that my CPU is many times faster than yours, and a couple of 
generations newer.  And yet I still have to be patient.  These load times 
were higher still when I was running RHEL 3 clones on this box.

There are some other things you 
really ought to do to squeak more performance out of this low-end 
machine.  Go into /etc/rc5.d and see what daemons are set to 
start.  Do you really need them all?  You'll find a lot of cruft in there 
right from the getgo.

Look into other Window Managers.  KDE & Gnome are both rather resource 
hungry.  Your machine probably has icewm installed or available.  That 
wuold be a good starting point to lighten up the resource load on your 
machine.  Also look into using a lighter weight browser, like Mozilla 
Firebird (or Firechicken, or whatever it's called today).  OOo is never 
going to be fast to load on that box.