How Can I Improve Linux Speed

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 02:04:29PM -0600, Donald_Sass at gov.nt.ca wrote:
> 
> In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I 
> loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K 
> laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.
> 
> The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
> machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
> Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.  
> 
> Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

The desktop can be slower for a long list of reasons.
Here are some common ones.

  * lack of memory
  * IPV6 look ups being slow.
  * host name; DNS slow lookups.

The  W2K desktop environment is not as large (yet) as a full blown
X-window system and window manager.

First you should do some profiling to see what is really slow.

   Is the system still trying to finish basic background (cron) tasks?
     "top" can tell you what is going on.  Let the box run for a couple 
     hours... once a week.... we can tidy these tasks up later.
     see prelink,  slocate.cron, logwatch, anacron, makewhatis.cron
   Are you running out of DRAM?
     If so try a smaller set of default daemons 
     (chkconfig --list | grep on).
     Try a lighter weight window manager/desktop.
   Are IPV6 lookups slow?  
     If so turn them off (most of us just should turn them
     off... see the archives for how.
   Are you having trouble resolving localhost?
     localhost and basic network connectivity is expected with X.
     If this is not correct fix it.

Here are some simple tests that can help us help you (timing results
on my box for reference).

    # top -n 1 | grep ^Mem
    Mem:    515848k total,   455440k used,    60408k free,    13612k buffers

    # time host `hostname`
    Box.mydomain.com has address 192.168.0.51

    real    0m0.250s
    user    0m0.004s
    sys     0m0.011s

    #  time host localhost
    localhost has address 127.0.0.1

    real    0m0.041s
    user    0m0.008s
    sys     0m0.002s

    # time host 127.0.0.1
    1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer localhost.

    real    0m0.052s
    user    0m0.002s
    sys     0m0.008s

    # time perl -v
    This is perl, v5.8.3 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
    ... 
    real    0m0.034s
    user    0m0.001s
    sys     0m0.003s

    # time xterm  -e date

    real    0m0.890s
    user    0m0.077s
    sys     0m0.023s

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Just say no to 74LS73 in 2004