[TriLUG] fedora 7 & 8 slowness?

[Tim Jowers]

JC,

  My times are just as bad even with lots of RAM. I thought it would be
story of bad disks and is for initial loading but, surprisingly, alot of
time is blown in initializing the graphics. Compare how slow the Windows XP
init is to the Linux init. The prior is 2.0.0.13 and the latter 2.0.0.10 so
this is fairly apples-to-apples.

   IMO, today's OS's are memory bound. If you are paging you are in a mess.
This is even more true to Windows that Linux. Windows basically just
absolutely goes to nothing once you use up the RAM. And stays broken even
after you kill off apps. I wonder how large the footprint of X really is? Of
KDE? of Gnome? Here is my Firefox startup times. I really like this as a
metric despite its issues.

After Boot  ---------------------   Re-run 1 ------------------------ Re-run
2
Fedora 8, DELL OptiPlex GX 620, 1GB RAM, :
8.67 seconds                        2.46seconds
2.05 seconds
Windows XP Pro, DELL Latitude D600, 2GB RAM:
87 seconds                           9
seconds                                    4 seconds

Linux test suite: # time firefox
Windows test suite:
echo. | time
"Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
echo. | time

  Conclusion. Laptops have slow disks and todays applications do a lot of
initialization at startup rather than being architected to do these things
in a lazy bg thread or in a cached way. E.g. Firefox is 6K and my disk
transfers at 55MB/s with hdparm; so, it "should" startup with a second or
so. Where's the sloth? Clearly the hdparm read transfer time is far more
optimistic than the real time to read Firefox from the disk. Talking to the
X layer? Drawing the windows? Doing some update check to the web (this one
should not be a differentiator as we compared apples-to-apples with
Firefox)?

TimJowers
P.s. vi?   I prefer vim. :-)  Just like this memory problem, Eclipse (Java
layer) can really be a productivity issue too. Compare your grep time to how
slow Eclipse search is!  The JVM startup time is a long-recognized problem;
so, many apps add a quick launcher to the appbar. Even the office suites do
this too. It's telling our industry has not really addressed this basic
issue. One *should* be able to lay out the firefox image on the disk in a
far more optimal way! Especially given today's caching disks!


On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Maxwell Spangler <
maxpublic08 at maxwellspangler.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, James c. Jones wrote:
>
> > I appreciate your thoughts on adding ram to my old laptop.
> > Unfortunately, My laptop can only hold 256mb more ( total of 512 ) which
> > might improve it some, but I have a speedier desktop with 640mb running
> > fedora 8 and it's sluggish as well.
>
> I suggest asking on forums like this for free, spare memory.  I can't help
> you
> with the laptop but anybody that wants two sticks of PC133 memory for free
> can
> have it.  It wouldn't sell on Ebay for $0.95 and I'd hate to see it go
> into a
> landfill.  Free memory can make postponing a new purchase more cost
> effective.
>
> > I may retreat to an earlier version of fedora and live with it. I don't
> > see that I have gained a lot from fedora 7.
> >
> > My guess that as programmers upgrade their base machines, they don't
> > recognize the bloat that appears on older pc's.
>
> The complaint that developers write bigger, more demanding programs and
> don't
> consider the impact on older hardware is one that has been repeated in the
> Linux community for over 10 years.  There was a time when everyone was
> happy
> to see bigger programs because bigger programs meant stability and
> features
> (not seen on Linux before but seen on Unix) and Linux software
> requirements
> had not outpaced the hardware people typically have.
>
> I'd guess that around the year 2001 developers made a big shift from
> providing
> basic functionality to more abstract ideas requiring plenty of
> infrastructure.
> GNOME and KDE, for example, may seem to do simple things on the screen,
> but
> the way they are implemented behind the scenes requires quite a bit.  This
> is
> the path we're on and we can't really stop it.  The only way around it for
> old
> hardware is to get off the path and claim some territory.  Your idea to go
> back to a previous Fedora and/or customize a distribution down to fit your
> needs is the best solution, IMHO.
>
> Just don't blame the developers -- you'll need the features they're
> working on
> in the future and the infrastructure that's appearing to be "bloat" right
> now
> will make it possible.
>
> --
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Maxwell Spangler
> Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
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