Performance shock

aburda ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org
Sun May 1 06:48:29 UTC 2005


Tom Adelstein Wrote: 
> 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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> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
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Hi Tom,



If I can scrape together enough money I'm going to upgrade my
laptop to 512 MB of ram but I am an illegal alien living in the Czech
Republic who has spent most of the last 5 years hitch hiking and being
a pseudo-vagabond - pseudo entreprenuer so every euro penny counts. 
BTW I'm on a Toshiba A10 2.2 Celeron laptop.

About Windows, the boot up time is irrelevant to me.  My main
concern is application startup time and subsequent responsiveness for a
normally configured laptop.  You are correct that Photoshop CS takes a
long time to startup on windows, but for me Photoshop on windows takes
about the same amount of time to startup as Swriter on linux.  With
Photoshop, I know I'm running it (in windows) on a system that is way
underpowered for the task so I can't complain (but still need it). 
Word processing is something my laptop handles like a charm (i.e. no
problem under windows) so it is kind of depressing to see OpenOffice on
linux run at the same performance level as Photoshop does on Windows. 
As much as I love Ubuntu I wouldn't really feel comfortable
recommending it to my friends as long as this is the case.  

I did though last night make some of the OO performance
modifications (oooprelink, cache) and it seemed to help some.

With all that aside, I understood everything you posted about
ways to make performance improvements except for swapiness.  What
precisely is 'swapiness' and where is it set?



Thanks



Aaron


-- 
aburda




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