Performance shock

[aburda]

Tom,



I understand how to modify the xorg.conf file (note in hoary it
is now xorg.conf and not XFree86.conf anymore, that was for warty) and
how to change the colors what I am wondering about is how I actually
change the video driver itself.  I.e. supposing I find a better driver
than what I have how would I actually go about installing the drive
files.  BTW I am using the i810 driver.  I'll do some research into
this to see what I can find.  

More importantly, I definately have some hardware problem with
linux setup.  The following are my startup times for a couple of apps
with only gnome, thunderbird and skype running. 



Swriter 25 sec

Firefox 13 sec

Nautilus 7 sec

Gedit 8 sec     

term window  8 sec     #nautilus, the term window and Gedit I would
expect to open immediately



BTW, on OO I've moved the graphics cache up to 128 and have run
oooprelink.



I've started using 'Music Player' to listen to mp3's while working but
it is practically unusable because whenever I open an application the
mp3 starts to skip.  Linux/Unix blows away windows in terms of
multitasking so something must be wrong.  The question is what.  I
suspect that whatever it is, its the same thing that the other people
who complain about ubuntu being extremely slow have a problem with. 
I've started with the hard disk



Here is the result of hdparm /dev/hda  (I set all this up last night,
prior it didn't have most of the useful functions enabled, IO_Support,
unmaskirq, etc. although doing so hasn't sped up my computer.) 



/dev/hda:

multcount    = 16 (on)

IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)

unmaskirq    =  1 (on)

using_dma    =  1 (on)

keepsettings =  0 (off)

readonly     =  0 (off)

readahead    = 256 (on)

geometry     = 58140/16/63, sectors = 30005821440, start = 0



It is running in udma5 mode which is its max.



When doing a hdparm -t /dev/hda  I get interesting results



Here are the results after running it 10 times consecutively



18 MB in 3.01 = 5.99 MB/sec

14 MB in3.13 = 4.48 MB/sec

14 MB in 5.21 = 4.36 MB/sec

36 MB in 3.18 = 11 MB/sec

38 MB in 3.16 = 12 MB/sec

44 MB in 3.09 = 14 MB/sec

48 MB in 3.01 = 15.93 MB/sec

42 MB in 3.07 = 13.67 MB/sec



As you can see it starts out really slow and then progressively gets
faster.  Last night when doing the same thing I eventually got it up to
23 MB/sec.  Nothing was running when I did this.  It seems really odd
that I would get such diverse test results.  Could it possibly be that
I have the wrong chipset for my laptop compiled in my kernel?  Can
anybody tell me what a UMDA 30 gig hard drive should be getting for
throughput?



Guess that's enough for now.





Aaron


-- 
aburda