Why is my comp slow?

**deutsixfive** · 06-07-2005

I'm running RH9 on a 1.6GHz laptop. I've a nVIDIA GeForce 4 graphics card. Nevertheless, in RH9 quite a few applications are quite slow. TUX Racer for instance is really jerky. It takes 4 seconds to start Mozilla. In Windows XP it takes 2 seconds. I've got 256MB RAM, and a 600MB swap. / and /var are in separate partitions. Any idea why my comp is slow?

**genesus** · 06-07-2005

have you tried commenting out your swap in fstab...it is visibly slower than running off of pure memory. ALso are you dual booting? Red Hat, maybe other distros as well, will be noticeably slower on a dual boot system.

**deutsixfive** · 06-07-2005

Wow, thanks for the quick reply. I can just safely comment out the swap in fstab? By the way how do I comment out a line?

Yes, I'm dual-booting XP and RH9. It's strange that RH9 should be slower under dual-boot, I mean XP didn't noticeably change when I installed RH9.

**jamey112** · 06-07-2005

i was thinking of dual booting my laptop, but laptops are just to unstable. i have a dell 600m 1.5ghz, 512 RAM, and windows is already slow on it. so i'm learning linux on my desktop, then going to make the change to just linux on the laptop.

**deutsixfive** · 06-07-2005

Well, I freshly installed XP recently, so a sparsely populated XP loads and executes quickly--faster than my desktop. My bro doesn't want to freshly install everything...

**genesus** · 06-07-2005

in the fstab file add a # to the beginning of the swap line, voila its commented out...restart and you will boot up without swap...with your amount of memory unless you do something really intensive you will not need a swap anyway. Or you could, if you know your swap, manually turn it off. Mine is /dev/hda2 do I can just type

Code:

swapoff /dev/hda2

And if I want to turn it back on

Code:

swapon /dev/hda2

**psic** · 06-08-2005

There are many reasons why a linux install can be slow. Check which processes are running and stop those which you do not need (for instance, on a laptop you probably will not need Cups started when you boot up, since you won't be doing much printing). Other ways of speeding up linux is to use a lighter GUI than KDE or Gnome (Xfce is my desktop environment of choice). Turning of any fancy things on your desktop will also help (things like weather plugins, network monitors, etc.). For best performance, install programs from source

As for the Tux Racer, make sure you have the proper drivers installed.

**deutsixfive** · 06-08-2005

What do you mean by the proper drivers for Tux Racer? How would I go about installing those?

Also, how would I be able to see what background processes are running and stop them? I think that would require editing the bootscripts but I have no idea how to do that.

**psic** · 06-08-2005

I ment video card drivers. Check the tutorials on this site, there should be something about installing the Nvidia drivers. I've only attempted Ati drivers, and never successfully

As for the processes, try KsysV, which is a graphical tool for the KDE desktop which you can use to stop/start processes. I think RH probably has quite a few things that only a server would need.

**eatinglemur** · 06-08-2005

NEVER run without swap. wtf is wrong with you guys?

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