Performance Issues

[davegouch]

Greetings!
I recently installed redhat 9 on p3 650MHZ labtop. I had Mandrake 7.1 installed a couple of years ago, and as I remember it was fast!! Redhat 9, on the other hand, seems really slow (slower than Microcrap). Switching between desktops (even with nothing open) takes several seconds, and when any window is open, even consoles, the time takes a lot longer. I am debating whether or not to dump Redhat and try Mandrake, or some other Linux (SuSe, etc.)
Any suggestions, recommendations, comments are greatly appreciated.
Thanx
Dave

[Hellmasker]

what desktop are u using, mandrake 7.1 would have been usign gnome 1.4 and kde 2.0 which were faster than the current versions but not as colourful or bloated/lots of features. try installing a different WM and see if it helps.

[The unL33T]

I also notice that RH9 is VERY slow on my notebook. It is a PIII 500 and Windows XP ran much much faster on it. I am thinking of going back to WinXP but the whole reason I went through the trouble of getting Linux is just to learn how to use it, even if XP is faster....

[Giro]

For some reason I always hear complants from RH users about speed, First thing to do is compile your kernel I noticed that I got a vast improvement when done stock kernels suck. Also stop all uneeded services. This is why I dont like RH it takes to much hacking to get up to scratch.

[jasonlambert]

ensure that you have dma access turned on as that will make it a lot faster.

if your harddrive is /dev/hda1, you would run (as root):

hdparm -d /dev/hda1

if it is on you will see:

/dev/hda1:
 using_dma    =  1 (on)

else you will see this if it is off:

/dev/hda1:
 using_dma    =  0 (off)

if it is turned off, then run hdparm again, but with -d1 (rather than just -d) to turn it on.

Jason
Jason

[flw]

Anyone know if the user in only refering to boot time rather than normal usage time? Before I could give any opinions I'd need to know which then details on the condition it having troubles with.

I've run XP and RH 9 with no noticeable differences that would fall into XP's favor on speed. Once booted most linux machines will out run XP/win2k machines serveral times over.

Seems the user has not posted back (at the moment) any info in 11 days.

[davegouch]

Greetings,
Thank you for all of the posts!
I will try the recommendations this weekend.
To clarify, I am talking about performance over all; booting up takes a while, but the thing that annoys me is just simple desktop switching; if I have a console open on one, and an internet browser on another, and nothing on a third, it takes seconds to clear the screen if going to an empty desktop, and the time is triple if any windows are open...
Again, thanks for the input!!

Dave