The Speed Factor -- Kubuntu vs. Gentoo

[Derek Broughton]

Lea Gris wrote:

> Bruce Marshall a écrit :
>> On Saturday 14 June 2008, Derek Broughton wrote:
>>> Well, no, his request was "how do I make Kubuntu as fast as my friend's
>>> Gentoo?", and I say run it on the same hardware.  I'm sure he can fine
>>> tune a few parameters in the kernel, but if he can prove a speed
>>> difference that would be obvious to a user, I'll eat a hat...
>> 
>> I would agree with this...
>> 
>> I would doubt that any *normal* user would be able to see a difference by
>> tweaking the kernel unless that user is doing something VERY heavy with
>> their
>> computer, like weather analysis or such...   and that makes them an
>> abnormal computer user.
>> 
>> The normal things that would affect the observed speed of a computer
>> would be:
>> 
>> CPU speed
>> RAM  (if in short supply)
>> Disk I/O
>> 
>> all of which are hardware.
>> 
>> No amount of software tweaking is going to make much difference unless
>> there is a serious problem with the software setup.
> 
> Like poor buggy SATA performance in K/Ubuntu?
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/119730>

What "software tweak" is going to solve this?  It's been open for exactly a
year, and I don't see that anyone has even defined the "bug", let alone
come up with a fix.  

> Like useless heavy debug messages junks from almost all KDE applications
> pushed along pipelines and written back to disk in file .xsession-errors
> each time you use a KDE program?

Again, what "tweak" is going to fix that.  You'd have to recompile _all_
those apps.  I agree that too many apps pour too much crap into the logs
(all the Network Manager data going to syslog comes to mind too - trying to
figure out what caused my wife's system to hand recently, I see NM is now
logging every new hardware registration in Hal - whether it's network or
not!) but it's not something that can be resolved with a tweak.

> Maybe that stupid default atime update that imply you need to know when
> each single file has bean read? (do you?)

OK, that's a simple tweak - can you provide any evidence that turning atime
off will make any _noticeable_ difference to the user experience, though?
> 
> Or maybe that SVG rendering engine that suck memory and CPU each time it
> update a damaged region after a window move, just because you have a
> very nice Hardy Heron SVG drawing as your desktop background?
> 
> I agree, there are things users can do to improve performance in
> Kubuntu, like avoiding SVG backgrounds.
> 
> There are other things like SATA slowness, poor choices in default mount
> options that require wise knowledge to be fixed.

And possibly default Gentoo setups _are_ much faster - but unless the OP is
prepared to test Kubuntu versus Gentoo on the same machine, it's pointless
to ask how to make his system as responsive as his friend's.
-- 
derek