Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (5100 mails)

[Carl William Spitzer IV <cwsiv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-06-28 at 22:40, Michael James wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 01:11 am, Sid Boyce wrote:
> 
> > The 2.6 kernel seems to be getting a bad reputation, root of all ills 
> > etc., I've been using from 2.6.0-pre kernels onwards on SuSE 9.0 and now 
> > 9.1, it's OK and much faster than 2.4.x for many of the reasons detailed 
> > in several articles and it will be the reason why many enterprises 
> > switch to Linux. I must see if I can find some benchmarks on google. 
> > Whatever the cause, it's not likely to be the kernel unless SuSE did 
> > something stupid, if they did, I've not noticed a slowdown.
> 
> I played with the 2.6 kernel under 9.0 and it seemed faster,
>  quicker to boot and more responsive.
> 
> Module hassles drove me back to 2.4
>  but I couldn't wait for the non-experimental release in 9.1.
> 
> Something might be mis-configured, but so far 9.1 is terrible.
> 
> Fresh vanilla install P4 2.4 Gig 1 Gig ram, nvidia 440 using nv driver.
> 
> Applications take forever to launch,
>  it can take Kmail 20 seconds to get to the next mail message
>  the system can lock up solid (mouse can't move cursor) for 5 minutes
>  then come good!
> 
> I see swapd up high in top and I've got a gig of ram?
> The normal raft of apps run about 400 Meg:
> 	Kmail	(I'm sus of that one)
> 	Firefox
> 	20 Konsoles (on 10 desktops)
> 	xmms			a luxury
> 	sometimes vmware	dangerous
> 	Grip				fatal
> 
> Yes it's a lot but 9.0 (and 8.2 and 8.1) did it OK.
> 
> If I rip some CDs using Grip and encode it with flac
>  I'll be pulling the plug before the 3rd CD.
> Running System Monitor (SuSE:System:More Programs:Memory Monitor)
>  shows no sign of a memory leak but inexplicable swapping.
> 
> I see X taking a lot of resources, so I'll try dropping resolution from 24 to 16.
> 
> 9.1 will get there eventually but right now,
>  it's running with diagnostics on every desktop.
> Once it's "in the zone" it won't redraw.
> 
> And I'm watching the trace on System Monitor
>  as if it were a relative on life support.
> 


IMHO you have done done something wrong.  I get better performance on a
PII 350 with 256mb.  Look into the IPv6 thread.  BTW how large is your
swap partition?

Check your fstab.  I removed the subfs experiment from both of my
machines.

CWSIV