Performance shock

[Tom Adelstein]

Aaron,

I'm comparing my Ubuntu system to another distribution I optimized now.
I'm running Ubuntu on a AMD Athon 2600 (2.0 Ghz) with 512 MB and it runs
pretty fast. Nothing like the times you noted below. The other system
runs a Sempron 2200 (1.5 Ghz) with 768 MB. It run faster than any I have
ever seen. The chip sets are both VIA and the motherboards are very
similar. 

Firefox is the only application with latency issues in Ubuntu on my box.
So, I'm checking to see if the Sempron box has initialization scripts to
spawn it faster.

Another issue to consider has to do with laptops in general. They all
run slower than desktops. Part of the problem has to do with the hard
drives and the other the processors. Even though most laptops say they
use a XYZ processor - they aren't identical to the desktop version. But,
even with the slower response times in laptops, your times appear
unusually slow.

I'm going to finish the process comparison and reply with a list of
gconf2 commands to speed up gnome; configuration file changes to free up
memory; elimination of some daemons to speed the boot and shutdown
process and some troubleshooting questions to see how your system
configuration rates with mine.

The developers of Ubuntu have done a lot of optimizations, but perhaps
we can do more to give it more torque. 

Tom




On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 04:51 -0400, aburda wrote:
> 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
>