Performance shock (BS)

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Sun Apr 24 14:01:55 UTC 2005


> > I meant that I also experience Linux/Gnome's overall
> > responsiveness to be often very poor compared to their Windoze counter
> > part.
> 
> Are you speaking of program responsiveness while running or while
> opening? 

As I said : "overall", either loading or running, or a mixture of both,
depending on the program. Hence why I said "overall", to make it
simpler ;o)
I didn't mean to keep this thread going on forever, though, as it's
pointless since there is no much the end user can do about it, other
than coughing money to buy hard drives and SATA or SCSI controllers and
set up a RAID0, which is not very defendable when windows acheive better
performance with the existing Hardware.
All I meant was to stand by the original poster, as he got mistreated
and everybody made it sound like he was the only one to experience what
he is experiencing.

> If the latter, I don't see the problem.  Open once, use for a
> /really long/ time comparatively. The opening speed is of small
> importance when a program will just keep on running, at least in my
> experience.

Yes, I did also state this in my message. This is what makes it
bareable, but it doesn't "excuse" it in any way or shape, and we ought
to have as responsive a desktop as possible, for a given hardware,
instead of getting used to sluggishness, when other OS's clearly
demonstrate that there is significant room for improvement...
Why settle for "good enough/bareable" responsiveness, when it's clear
that you can have "good" responsiveness, without the trailing "enough". 
I don't have a problem if Warty/Gnome 2.10 is sluggish on my old Pentium
200MMX, because I expect it. However I don't see why it would still be
sluggish, in some case, on my newxer machine, when XP aps, even when run
from within Linux (using VMware), are clearly loads more responsive,
both loading and running speed.

Again, I don't find Linux slow, however Gnome, and many Gnome apps, both
small and big, are very sluggish compared to their WinXP equivalent, at
least on my machine.
Again, I think only Gnome apps, and not Linux, are at fault, because
when I run, from within Gnome, non-Gnome applications (xmms, blender,
Quanta...), they are very responsive.
So looks like it's the Gnome specific GUI layers, that slow Gnome apps.
Is that "Gtk" ?

Also, loa dtime is still relevant, because you can't leave them running
forever. Most people have turn their machine off at night, to save
money, and the planet. Also, some apps require loads of RAM and you have
to close them as soon as you are finished with them. I started with
256MB, which seemed perfect, until I tried to use OOo. Then I upgraded
to 512MB. Was much better, but then I tried to use X-Plane. Takes 2
minutes to load, and once you close it, system takes 10 minutes to
recover, progressively. I luckily worked kind of a work around, by
turning off swapping, which forces Linux to reload all the stuff on the
swap into memory, before disabling it. (then I turn swap on again of
course). 


> OTOH, windows programs sometimes snap right open <loads loaded in the
> background earlier) then fall over.  Most problematic.

Not sure what you mean here, my English vocabulary is not rich enough
yet... :-/  It does sound like it's being a bit negative about Windoze
though ;o)


--
Vince





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