-----Original Message----- From: Sid Boyce [SMTP:sboyce@blueyonder.co.uk]
SuSE is made pretty generic for x86 hardware, so is not optimised for any particular CPU, except for the kernels. I can't say Mandrake is dramatically or very noticeably faster than SuSE. Gentoo is faster as it is optimised for the hardware it's running on,
That (and alberto's comment re Knoppix) reminded me that Gentoo (and some Knoppix versions) use prelinking to speed up KDE startup times. SUSE 9.1 comes with prelink support, but doesn't use prelink by default. What I mean by "prelink support" is that the RPM provided on the CDs/DVD not only installs prelink, but also an SuSEconfig.prelink script that ensures prelink is re-run after installing/updating packages. So I did a quick experiment. I had a "disposable" system lying around running 9.1. Spec is 900MHz CPU, 256MB Ram, reasonably fast HD. My unscientific test was running "time kate" from a konsole window - because this gives fairly repeatable results and the time returned is, in the case of Kate, pretty much the time to being "ready for input." Out of the box "time kate" reported 4.5s. Pre-linking kate cut about 0.5s off this time. (A little poking about seemed to show that pre-linking cut 0.5s off the loading time of most KDE apps.) But I also noticed that doing an "export LANG=C" before launching kate cut a full second(!) off the startup time. (My default LANG on this box is en_GB.UTF-8) A quick analysis of the output from "strace -r konsole" showed that indeed, it was taking about 1 second for X11 to parse the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose file. Perhaps one of the reasons that some people have reported 9.1 as feeling slower than 9.0 is the change to UTF8 as the default locale in SuSE? Legal Disclaimer: Any views expressed by the sender of this message are not necessarily those of Application Solutions Ltd. Information in this e-mail may be confidential and is for the use of the intended recipient only, no mistake in transmission is intended to waive or compromise such privilege. Please advise the sender if you receive this e-mail by mistake.
On Monday 04 October 2004 15:13, Vince Negri wrote:
Out of the box "time kate" reported 4.5s.
Pre-linking kate cut about 0.5s off this time. (A little poking about seemed to show that pre-linking cut 0.5s off the loading time of most KDE apps.)
But I also noticed that doing an "export LANG=C" before launching kate cut a full second(!) off the startup time. (My default LANG on this box is en_GB.UTF-8)
A quick analysis of the output from "strace -r konsole" showed that indeed, it was taking about 1 second for X11 to parse the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose file.
Perhaps one of the reasons that some people have reported 9.1 as feeling slower than 9.0 is the change to UTF8 as the default locale in SuSE?
Thank you very much! With your suggestions it is much faster now. On this machine kate launch time went from 6.3 down to 4.3. konsole from 5.4 to 3.3. It is still not as responsive as this kde 2.2.1 I'm using now (Suse 7.3, the best so far), but it is coming closer. What am I missing with the LANG =C setting? How to enable it system wide? One final note: your findings show that performance really seems to have been forgotten. And the saddest part is some people are blind enough not to recognize it.
participants (2)
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alberto-g -
Vince Negri