[TriLUG] fedora 7 & 8 slowness?

Brian Phelps brphelps at ieee.org
Fri Mar 28 16:36:53 EDT 2008


Check your swapiness:
# cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 
80

# sysctl vm.swappiness=80


high numbers mean hardrive swap is preferred. Low num means RAM is
preferred.  

Anyone else here have more info on this?  My laptop runs Ubuntu Gutsy 64
on a 1.6GHzdual core intel w/ 1 G RAM. 

The good:
all drivers are mostly free, no firmware cutter / ndiswrap mess for
wireless or 3D display

The bad:
I swear its slower than my 32 bit 1.6G Athlon single core w/ 768M RAM
for office stuff, Virtual machines, and web browsing, but DSP and
compiling is fast as hell.

The Ugly:
It came w/ Vista basic which I never once booted into

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 15:53 -0400, James c. Jones wrote:
> John,
> 
> >From what you are saying, I need to revert to fedora core 5, ubuntu or
> even mepis, to get back to a reasonable response time with my 256 mb of ram.
> 
> That is when my brother ( a microsoft fan ) would respond -- winxp runs
> decently with only 256mb of ram. ( my laptop is dual boot with winxp pro
> and 256mb of ram on it -- came that way from Toshiba ). And it does
> perform "decently" .
> 
> I recently took Ubuntu & mepis off of my laptop and installed fedora 7.
> Luckily I still have the install cd's for it.
> 
> I am hoping that there is a solution so that I won't have to do that. (
> other than adding memory. )
> 
> jcj
> John Mitchell wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:33 PM, jonesjc <jonesjc at intrex.net> wrote:
> > <snip>
> >   
> >>  Both exhibited slowness of operation. My laptop which is an intel celeron 1.1ghz processor with 256mb of ram is extremely slow. Once I installed F7 on the laptop, I tried starting firefox (gnome, x-windows). It took more than 30 seconds to start.
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > 1) A startup time of 30 seconds for Firefox with Gnome & 256 mb is
> > very good, ANY Distro.
> >
> > 2) Gnome is a memory hog (John gets ready for the Flame War). With 256
> > mb you need to get rid of everything you don't need ( try disabling
> > Parallel port in BIOS - Samba).
> >
> > 3) Consider an alternate Desktop, try KDE, see if Fedora has IceWm,
> > XFCE, or Fluxbox available as a yum install. You may give up some
> > functionality but the speedup can be worth it.
> >
> > john mitchell
> >   





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