Performance shock

Tom Adelstein adelste at yahoo.com
Sun May 1 06:00:49 UTC 2005


On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 17:01 -0400, aburda wrote:
> Adelstein,
> 
> 
> 
> Would you care to share any of your secrets with us?  I've got a
> laptop (Toshiba 2.2 GHZ celeron with 256 MB of RAM) and I would say that
> windows generally runs faster on it (OS loading & Application loading)
> for big programs like Photoshop CS, Macromedia and Office.  I'd love to
> speed it up so if you're in on something I'm not.....
> 
> I've got pre-link going.  I've got the 686 kernel (although
> haven't completely tailored it but someone told me the performance
> improvement would be negligible).  What else do you recommend?
> 
> 
> 
> Aaron


First, I suggest you increase your RAM to 768 MB. If you run Photoshop,
I wouldn't run it with less than 512 MB. Graphics programs need 1 GB of
RAM on Win32 and UNIX platforms. 

Use OOoprelink, set the graphics cache on openoffice to 128 MB with 20
MB per object. Also keep OOo preload running.

Change swappiness to 10.

Get rid of your mail transport and everything else but sshd. You want to
reduce unnecessary items loading from your init scripts at bootup.

Also, even though you think Windows is faster, it just can't be. Part of
the illusion is the fact that the desktop appears while the program is
still booting. The same think with applications -- they appear but you
really can't use them for a few seconds.

I've run Photoshop for years on high end Mac OS -- old world and new
world. I like the product because I can use the entire Mac desktop as
part of the application. I also like gimp. I use have high end fonts for
gimp and am able to do pretty much everything I have done with
Photoshop. I think gimp is more responsive.

But, I've never seen Photoshop load fast on any OS and we use to have it
available on UNIX. Word loads faster in Crossoveroffice for me on Linux
than it does on Windows. 

That my quick tune up. I need to check how write ahead works and I'll
get back to you on those settings too. One other thing - yu didn't
mention your video card. You can improve performance base on the driver.
Are you using ATI Radeon 9000 by any chance?





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