Looking for suggestions to speed up desktop performance

[Le grand pinguin]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 07:30:59AM +0100, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> > Things just seem sluggish when I move windows around and the
> > > windows are slow to redraw.
> > > 
> > > My system:
> > > 
> > > Radeon 7000 AGP w/ 32MB
> > > Sempron CPU (1.6GHz)
> > > Gigabyte MB ( KT600 chipset )
> > > PC3200 256MB of RAM
> 
> Yep definitely, as Link said, add more RAM.  My system was about similar
> to yours, then I switched from 256MB of RAM, to 512MB, and the
> improvement was obvious, try it, RAM is cheap and is always a good
> thing.

Sorry, but i must object. Either there's enough RAM for your running applications
or there isn't - in the later case the system (better: the kernel swap daemon) will
start swapping stuff to disk and _that_ kills performance.
Some X applications are notorious for munging RAM like potatoe chips but that usually
shows up only after using them for quite a while (mozilla comes to mind ...).
In all likelyness - the first place to look at, given the OP's symptoms: graphic card
configuration. What driver do you use? Does the X server take advantaqge of the graphic
card's hardware accelleration? Sorry, i'm not an graphic card expert (never bothered,
i'm a programmer, not a gamer :-) so i can't give you more advice for this specific
card(but, i'm running with a humble ATI Radeon  Rage 128 Pro on 256 Mb RAM more than
satisfied). Oh, and until recently my main devel box had a Pentium 233Mhz with 64Mb RAM.
Graphic performance was excelent.

> Vince, happy with 512MB...

RAM _can_ be nice for a lot of memory hungr applications (kernel compiles etc.) but
sluggish display response doesn't seem to be the most obvious symptom of RAM-lack.

Just my 0.02 $
  Ralf Mattes
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