looking for a new distro

[Stryker]

I'm looking for a new distro. I'm no newbie to linux or anything, but the speed that I'm getting with all of the distros I have is driving me insane. So I need one that is well known for being fast. In distros I have, like redhat, dragging windows gives me a major graphics lag, right clicking takes a bit too long. and i know it's not any settings i have as i can hear the computer think ever so hard trying to make it work. I'm at a bit of a loss considering 1GHz, 512MB, 16MB video memory, and 7,200 RPM harddrive. If there is a way to speed up redhat that'd be great too. As for a new distroy... I have plenty of time and I'm pretty good at figuring this stuff out. Thanks.

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: Stryker ]

[voidmain]

Wow, 72,000 RPM hard drive. Where can I get one of those? I think you meant 7,200 RPM. At any rate, I don't believe changing distros will likely solve your problem. All Linux distros use the same Linux kernel (not the same version and not the same patches mind you). They also all use XFree86. What you need to do is some performance analysis with hdparm, top, iostat, etc.

But from the little amount  of info I have to go on I suspect that this is a video card issue. What video card do you have and is the video memory shared or is it on a physical video card? I have found very good results with a GeForce2 (or better) with 32MB of video memory or better. I have another machine with onboard video and shared video RAM and the machine is slow as molasses.

If you have a lot of disk activity than you may have a thrashing condition depending on how you have your swap configured. That is unlikely with that much RAM if you are not doing any heavy duty work. It could also be another piece of hardware in your I/O chain that isn't fully compatible and the driver/module used doesn't perform well. You might list the make/model/type of each piece of equipment involved (motherboard, RAM, disk, video card, etc).

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
Wow, 72,000 RPM hard drive. Where can I get one of those? I think you meant 7,200 RPM. At any rate, I don't believe changing distros will likely solve your problem. All Linux distros use the same Linux kernel (not the same version and not the same patches mind you). They also all use XFree86. What you need to do is some performance analysis with hdparm, top, iostat, etc.

But from the little amount  of info I have to go on I suspect that this is a video card issue. What video card do you have and is the video memory shared or is it on a physical video card? I have found very good results with a GeForce2 (or better) with 32MB of video memory or better. I have another machine with onboard video and shared video RAM and the machine is slow as molasses.

If you have a lot of disk activity than you may have a thrashing condition depending on how you have your swap configured. That is unlikely with that much RAM if you are not doing any heavy duty work. It could also be another piece of hardware in your I/O chain that isn't fully compatible and the driver/module used doesn't perform well. You might list the make/model/type of each piece of equipment involved (motherboard, RAM, disk, video card, etc).

13.3

[voidmain]

Ahhh, I had no idea you were referring to a notebook computer. This severly limits your options on video. I'll look the equipment over after I get a bite to eat and see if I can find any performance issues for you. As far as hdparm what is the output from this command:

# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

Run the command a few times with as little system activity as possible and post your results.

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
Ahhh, I had no idea you were referring to a notebook computer. This severly limits your options on video. I'll look the equipment over after I get a bite to eat and see if I can find any performance issues for you. As far as hdparm what is the output from this command:

# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

Run the command a few times with as little system activity as possible and post your results.

That told me that 60mb were transferred at 20.51mb/s

That isn't the exact quote, but the numbers are right. i did it earlier and just happened to remember. i don't think my video problem is the problem though. i get great video, in both linux and windows. 16mb is plenty i think. there is always hard drive activity while i'm in linux. there are times it stops for about 2 or 3 minutes but then it starts up again. I'm not sure how to check the hdparm -t in windows... anyone know of a way to do the same test?

[voidmain]

No, the hdparm is a Linux command. When in Linux have a shell open and run the "top" command. By default it sorts the process list by CPU utilization. When the hard drive light is flashing take note of the top couple of processes. Let me know what those processes are and what %CPU they are using. Also get some numbers from the top of the "top" display: CPU States, Mem, and Swap.

One thing that can cause a lot of hard drive activity right after startup is a command/process called "updatedb". What this does is creates a database of all files on your hard drive, for the "locate" command, and is usually set to run late at night when there should be little activity. Problem is, on a laptop you probably shut it off at night so the updatedb will run as soon as you start it up the next day. If this is the cause of your hard drive problem and you don't care about the locate database you can disable this command. Also what services do you have running? If you are running redhat you can do this:

$ /sbin/chkconfig --list | grep on

Dragging windows slowly to me is most probably a video card performance issue. According to everything I have read this video card was not supported until v4.2 of XFree86. What version are you running? But there are a few reports on the 1805-S204 at http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/toshiba.html

Someone else mentioned having slow problems with this card here: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2002-March/016492.html

And fixed it using a driver from here: http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/ (assuming you have XFree86 v4.2.0).

And this page is interesting for a toshiba laptop owner and also mentions the above driver giving accelerated X capability: http://www.zadok.org.uk/laptop/html/single.html

It also mentions a "toshset" command that gives lots of info for toshiba laptops. You might want to download, install it and run "toshset -q" and post the output. Get the command here: http://www.schwieters.org/toshset/

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Stryker]

thanks void main, those were quite helpfull. I don't mean to sound like a retard or anything but how do i go about installing the object file you linked me to? I'll probably have to recompile my kernel but i am not sure how to have that compile with it.

[voidmain]

No, you shouldn't have to recompile your kernel. First make sure you are running XFree86 v4.2.0. If you are not then do not perform this procedure until we do more research. If you are running v4.2.0 then download the http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/trident_drv.o file to /tmp, then open a shell and do this:

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
# cp trident_drv.o trident_drv.o.bak
# cp /tmp/trident_drv.o .

It may ask if you want to overwrite, answer yes.

# chmod 755 trident_drv.o

Then restart Xwindows and see if it helps. If it does not or if it causes problems you may have to revert back to the old driver (and you may have to do this at a text console if X doesn't work). To revert back from a text console, log in as root:

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
# cp trident_drv.o.bak trident_drv.o

Then start X and you should be back to where you were before this little exercise.

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Stryker]

This corrected the problem for dragging the windows and such, but launching programs takes forever. I open the shell and it stops and thinks for about 9 seconds or so before opening. I tried top and the top few were X, init, top(obviously), and kdeinit. So now what I have left to do is disable the updatedb and somehow make these damned programs launch faster.

[voidmain]

How long is forever?  You seem to have respectable disk I/O at 20MB/s. If it takes like 20 seconds to bring up a terminal then there is something else wrong. It very possibly could be network related (X has networking built in to it and improper networking configuration can often cause either X not to start or be very slow). What distro and version are you using again?

Also, in the top command how much % idle did it show at the top? And what did it show for memory/swap?

Also, "gnome-terminal" in Gnome and "konsole" in KDE are resource hogs for just being a terminal. Try pressing "ALT+F2" and type in "xterm" and hit enter. Compare the speed with typing in "gnome-terminal" or "konsole". xterm doesn't have to start all the in-between layers of crap that the gnome-terminal and konsole have to. I find Gnome apps to be slower than KDE apps and straight X apps are the fastest.

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
How long is forever?  You seem to have respectable disk I/O at 20MB/s. If it takes like 20 seconds to bring up a terminal then there is something else wrong. It very possibly could be network related (X has networking built in to it and improper networking configuration can often cause either X not to start or be very slow). What distro and version are you using again?

Also, in the top command how much % idle did it show at the top? And what did it show for memory/swap?

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

I thought 20 was kind of slow, is there any way (other than hdparm as i've already tried everything in there) to bring it up some? As for the top information i'll have that in a few moments... i'll just be editing this post.

so here is the top of "top":

CPU states:  6.3% user,  3.7% system,  0.0% nice, 89.9% idle
Mem:   239684K av,  123796K used,  115888K free,       0K shrd,   20596K
buff
Swap:  131092K av,       0K used,  131092K free                   52584K
cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
  932 root      16   0  1016 1016   828 R     2.8  0.4   0:00 top
  557 root      15   0 31468  14M  3228 S     0.9  6.1   0:06 X
    1 root      15   0   480  480   420 S     0.0  0.2   0:05 init
    2 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd
    3 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kapmd
    4 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    5 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kswapd

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: Stryker ]

[voidmain]

Also look back at my previous post (just prior to this one). I added some stuff about xterm/konsole/gnome-terminal at the end while you were typing your message.

At the console of my Athlon 1600 w/512MB and a GeForce2 w/32MB running RedHat 8.0 Bluecurve Gnome it takes less than a second to start any of those three terminals, in fact I barely hit ENTER and bang, they are on my screen.  From my laptop terminal servered into my Athlon xterm takes about a  second, konsole takes a few seconds and gnome-terminal takes around 6 seconds (and this is starting them all over a network connection).

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Stryker]

I've tried running xterm and it didn't take as long, it only took 3 seconds. I timed other programs...
apache configurator: 6.7 seconds
KTron:   5 seconds
the kde menu: almost a second
abiword: 4.3 seconds

I could do more but i feel i'd get the same results. I also find it sad that my lan is almost as fast as my harddrive is in linux. 20mb/second in comparison to 11mb/s (100mbps).

[voidmain]

Not true. Your hard drive is 20 MegaBYTE per second. Your LAN is only 11 MegaBIT per second. 20 MB (big B) is 160Mbps compared to your 11Mbps LAN (which you will not get 11Mbps anyway because of overhead and other factors. You might get more like 7 or 8 Mbps max). And yes, often times networks can be as fast as hard drives. For instance, Gigabit network will outperform most hard drives unless you have many of them in a RAID stripe set. I am getting 32MB/s. 20MB/s is not all that bad, you may be able to get more if you play with the hdparm but I doubt it on a laptop drive. For instance, do this:

# /sbin/hdparm /dev/hda

which will list your current drive settings (dma, etc). If the settings are not optimal for your drive you can change the settings with hdparm and retest, but *be careful*, certain incorrect settings can screw up your drive. Look at the man page on "hdparm" and do a web search for more information before proceeding.

[ November 12, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
Not true. Your hard drive is 20 MegaBYTE per second. Your LAN is only 11 MegaBIT per second. 20 MB (big B) is 160Mbps compared to your 11Mbps LAN (which you will not get 11Mbps anyway because of overhead and other factors. You might get more like 7 or 8 Mbps max). And yes, often times networks can be as fast as hard drives. For instance, Gigabit network will outperform most hard drives unless you have many of them in a RAID stripe set. I am getting 32MB/s. 20MB/s is not all that bad, you may be able to get more if you play with the hdparm but I doubt it on a laptop drive. For instance, do this:

# /sbin/hdparm /dev/hda

which will list your current drive settings (dma, etc). If the settings are not optimal for your drive you can change the settings with hdparm and retest, but *be careful*, certain incorrect settings can screw up your drive. Look at the man page on "hdparm" and do a web search for more information before proceeding.

[ November 12, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

100mbps 8 bits to a byte that would make 12.5 megabytes a second. This isn't for file transfers or anything... this is just bare transfer without a protocol. Not very usefull but still, I wouldn't just include the data in a packet, but also it's header and such. I've played with hdparm for about 2 hours today with no real luck. I raised it from 19.4 to 20.51. That video driver I got seems to help a lot. i'll have to make sure i save it somewhere as I'm one of those fellas who formats about every 2 weeks or so. (i get bored and i can't stay settled) The only thing I need to do now is finish my modem, and make these damned programs load faster. i'll be back in a few, going to linux for modem stuff. thanks.