lördag 02 oktober 2004 02:00 skrev Randall R Schulz:
One thing that occurs to me about SuSE (vs. an unknown set of other distributions that don't do this) is its default use of the "desktop" kernel option.
As I understand this option, it increases the rate of some periodic kernel actions such as process scheduling to produce a more responsive feel for interactive operation. I'm not sure I remember this correctly, but I think it produces a ten-fold reduction in the CPU scheduling quantum (or, viewed the other way around, ten times more potential reschedulings per second). For a processor such as Bahram's "Ultra high speed CPU" (an AMD K6 at 550 MHz) that could account for a good bit of overhead when viewed as a percentage of available CPU cycles.
I think a part of the problem, is that specs about system requirements are way too low. One of my Pentium machines went down, and I had to use an olde K6 400 MHz instead, with 256 Mb of ram. So slow, it's horrible ... and the problem is, memory usage. The newer KDE uses a lot more memory, than it's given credit for. When the specs are given out, it says what 256 Mb of ram? it's almost unusable with that little ... I've got 512Mb with an AMD64 and it's way too slow. The reason, is the following: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 511356 504064 7292 0 25364 125168 -/+ buffers/cache: 353532 157824 Swap: 1895628 447084 1448544 It's using as much memory in swap, as it has memory available. For my system to be nice, it needs 1Gb of memory. Right now, it operates quite nicely, but when it starts there's a lot of disk activity that is the result of swapping taking place, while modules and libraries are being loaded. SuSE should make note of this, and for systems like a K6, actually recommend a lighter desktop. My €0.2 worth.