fedora-list Digest, Vol 10, Issue 183

[Kshitij Velhal]

Yahoo messenger is not always on. Also not all the programs run at once.

I don't think its due to a particular application. I tried running
firefox, GNUCash, Terminal, Yahoo Messenger, gqview etc individually
different combintaion. The effect is almost same.
Openoffice, I guess will take more time on windows either. so not
considered. Only conclusion is more the applications (>2-3) worst the
performance.

Will upgrade to FC3 make any difference? 

-Kshitij

> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:12:21 +0000
> From: James Wilkinson <james at westexe.demon.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: FC2 GUI on Intel Celeron 500MHz very slow
> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> Message-ID: <20041210231221.GB16441 at howells.westexe.demon.co.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> 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.
>