FC2 GUI on Intel Celeron 500MHz very slow

[James Wilkinson]

Kshitij Velhal wrote:
> Thanks James for you time and effort...

No problem.

> The typical application mix that I run includes Firefox browser (2-3
> windows no tabs), yahoo messenger, evolution, GNUCash, 1-2 Terminals,
> occasionally openoffice programs and gqview

All at once? Could you try one or two of them at a time, and try and
narrow it down? Or try running *without* one or two of them, and see if
things get any better?

I don't have any experience with yahoo messenger and don't know what it
does. I strongly suspect that it's closed source and programmed to be
flashy rather than efficient (although one could say that about certain
open source apps, too).

Note that openoffice inherently does quite a lot of disk reading. It
might be worth getting the Windows version of it, and comparing how it
performs under Windows 2000.

> The hard disk is quiet old say @3-4 years. Motherboard doesn't support
> latest and graetest hard disks. So will have to bear with it. Is Hard
> disk the culprit?

Um.

I don't think a three to four year old disk should particularly be a
problem. I suspect your motherboard *does* support some of the latest
hard disks: mine does, and it's a five year old BX based motherboard.
But I doubt your disk subsystem is going to be much slower for your
purposes than the equivalent on the latest Pentium 4.

You could try
hdparm -tT /dev/hda
to see what sort of throughput you get, but with that range of apps, I
suspect you're going to be having lots of relatively short reads rather
than a few long ones. In that situation, a hard disk spends more of its
time getting the head to the right part of the disk than it does
transferring the data to the computer.

Three more commands that are worth trying, to make sure that the hard
disk is OK:
# smartctl -l error /dev/hda
which will check if the disk has recorded any errors
# smartctl -t short /dev/hda
which will do a low-level check on the disk: wait a minute for that to
run, then do
# smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda
to see the results.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | F-lock [on some modern computer keyboards] is like a
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