John, On Sunday 22 October 2006 07:16, John Pierce wrote:
Hello list!
I just installed opensuse 10.1 X86_64 on my new Athlon 64 base system, 160GB sata II 3GB drive and I am not seeing what I perceive as a speed demon.
You should not expect 64-bit machines to be faster 32-bit machines with comparable clock speeds. Quite the opposite, really. The only good reason to go to 64-bit machines is when you need the virtual address range they afford.
...
I notice the same thing with other apps which I would have thought would be extremely faster but I am not seeing the performance difference I expected. Still 4 to 5 seconds to open the gimp, 7 to 8 seconds to open openoffice writer.
As others have pointed out, the times you're mentioning are strongly dominated by disk performance and are largely independent of CPU and RAM speeds. You should note that it is possible to get 10,000 RPM SATA drives. If you want a snappy system, there's two things you should acquire: 1) Fast drives 2) More drives In particular, w.r.t. (2), having at least one drive for system functions and another for user data files is very helpful. On the most recent system I put together, I have a small (-ish) 15,000 RPM Ultra-320 SCSI drive for the root file system and swap (which will be rarely used, since I have 4 GB of RAM) and a medium-capacity (150 GB) 10,000 RPM SATA drive for /home. Also, RAM continues to be a bottleneck for CPU-bound activities, so getting the fastest RAM that your mainboard can exploit is worthwhile.
I have loaded all of the optimized defaults in the bios and 512Mb of pc3200 ram.
Maybe I am was just deluding myself and built myself up for an extremely fast machine, one that would pale my athlon xp machines by comparison.
This is an extremely fast machine (based on the Asus P5B mainboard): - Core 2 Duo @ 3.0 GHz (overclocked from the rated 2.67 GHz) - 4 GB PC6400 DDR2 RAM @ 900 MHz FSB (overclocked from rated 800 MHz) - Ultra-320 SCSI Adaptor - 36 GB, 15,000 RPM, Ultra-320 disk - 6 SATA-III ports - 150 GB 10,000 RPM, SATA-III disk - nVidia GeForce 7300
Is there something that I should have/could have done during the installation that is affecting the performance? Did I miss something?
Probably not. You're seeing performance commensurate with the hardware you put together, I'd say.
TIA
John
Randall Schulz