[TriLUG] My slow linux machine
Magnus Hedemark
chrish at trilug.org
Mon Feb 16 10:11:57 EST 2004
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.
More information about the TriLUG
mailing list