Why isn't Linux Fast?

[filp]

I'm starting to see this idea that "linux is faster on low spec machines" with a few of my co-workers. And are then disapointed when it doesn't seem to live up to the expectation.

I think perhaps a more apt description would be Linux provides you with the options to use more "light weight" applications to run a system. And Linux will let you chop out the things you don't need ( like a desktop environment) to make a lower spec machine perform better.

There is the important difference. When using heavy weight applications like KDE, Open Office and Mozilla you can expect to need similar power to a windows machine. I still think linux does quite a few things a great deal faster than Microsoft Windows (compile, networking, encryption) but in a fully fledged desktop environment with desktop applications it is rarely the case.

Interestingly enough I often find that to fix the problem of slowness for people, improving the interactivity of the system if often the first step. Pre-emptive kernel patch and good video drivers go a long way to making a desktop "feel" faster.


Ideas?
Filp.

[Jo.Mo.]

Linux has breathed new life into my desktop, my 466 celeron described below. before i could never watch a 700 meg movie on Windows 98 without it skipping every time i moved my mouse or just every few seconds, but now i can watch it perfectly smooth using MPlayer. I know that goes along the lines of your "light weight" apps, but the same is the case when i run IE on this thing, it hangs constantly and whenever it loads a page it hangs my music, as with not the case with any of the linux browsers. I think linux is ready for the desktop in any respect, unless you've got the whiny "L33t Gamerz" on your tail.

[filp]

I wasn't really trying to say that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Just that people expect a full kde multimedia environment to run seamlesslly on a 486 just because it's Linux.

Filp.

[Jo.Mo.]

i know, just throwing my 2 cents in about the desktop part. i agree with you on the 486 part as well, altho i think for "not as old"(like mine) computers, linux is your best option unless you want to use Win 98, which has become obsolete(like the rest of the windows OS line).

[Hayl]

Originally posted by Jo.Mo.
i know, just throwing my 2 cents in about the desktop part. i agree with you on the 486 part as well, altho i think for "not as old"(like mine) computers, linux is your best option unless you want to use Win 98, which has become obsolete(like the rest of the windows OS line).

there are 2 Window OS lines and only one is obsoleted now; the 95/98/ME line - thank god. the NT/2000/XP Window OS line is still going.

(or did you mean Windows in general is obsolete in a more general sense as in it is obsolete compared to Linux and Mas OS?)

[gtalum]

Linux IS great for older machines. I run Gentoo on my AMD K6-2 400 MHZ machine. It positively screams compared to Win 98 that used to be on it. You are correct in determining WHY Linux is faster. it's because Linux lets you trim out what you don't need, and use the existing resources much more efficiently. Running a lightweight WM like Fluxbox, you can get a great looking user interface, and IMHO all the usability of KDE or "the OS that shall not be named", without the performance tradeoffs. Gentoo is even better than a lot of other distros in that you can compile everything optimized for your processor. Try that with Bill's CrapWare(R). :D

[Jo.Mo.]

Originally posted by Hayl
there are 2 Window OS lines and only one is obsoleted now; the 95/98/ME line - thank god. the NT/2000/XP Window OS line is still going.

(or did you mean Windows in general is obsolete in a more general sense as in it is obsolete compared to Linux and Mas OS?)


I meant in the general sense, i've been forced to use Windows for the past few days because i'm in between Distros, and i can't figure out what to do with it. in linux you can do whatever you feel like, but when i hop onto my windows partition i end up just staring at the screen, thinking how much it would cost me to go buy some software to put on it to actually make it useful.

[CMonster]

One thing that people seem to forget is that contemporary software is designed for contemporary machines. In fact the software often drives the continuous push for bigger, better hardware.

Mandrake 9.1 is designed for the same type of equipment as Win2k/XP. I believe that you would find these OSes to be as painful to run on a P200.

[scinerd]

I work in a company with a large number of linux machines. Most of these machines are old windows machines. For example in general we can give a person a 600Mhz linux machine and they are happy. On the windows side we don't give out anything under 800mhz because they tend to be to slow.

Most of the time when a user setups up thier own linux box it tends to be slower because tons of things are turned on like web servers, nfs, samba. So they have a bunch of servers turned on that they don't need. You can get a good speed increase by going through and trimming back what's turn on. The other advantage of this is if a service is not turned on then it can't be used to break into your machine.

The other big thing you can do to help speed is rebuild your kernal and trim out what you don't need. I have never bothered doing this but I have seen it done for our cluster and it did speed things up.

The biggest place where linux out shines windows is on the server. With samba I have heard it can server out files something like 4 times faster then a windows machine. You can also have a fast machine run a number of different services and from what I have seen run longer and faster then a windows box. In this market if you can get away with cheaper low cost systems it makes the boys upstairs very happy.

[ph34r]

I've run 4 instances of KDE/Gnome (combined too) at one time off a P2-233 with 384mb ram using some P75 computers with 16mb ram as X terminals.... no slower than a single instance of the DE running directly on the server.

[bproffitt]

It's not Linux that's slow, per se, it's the desktop environments that run atop it, IMHO.

As soon as I upgraded to GNOME2, I had to upgrade my machine as well.

Peace,
Brian Proffitt

[deanrantala]

I was suprised to find out (in my case) that slack kicked the hell out of win98 on my celeron 333. How I see it is like this: A fresh install (full) of win 98 vs. ....say...Slack (full install also). Hands down, 98 will boot and initially boot faster. But then, lets add office 97 (or 2000), bulletproof ftp, photoshop 7, winamp 3, norton firewall, windowblinds (for eye candy compareable to gnome on the same machine:D ), and we can't forget to download those "critical" security updates as well as ugrade IE explorer to 6.0. Now clock that same system and you will see a big swap in difference. Now you have a linux box that *fully* boots in 1/2 the time 98 takes (and 1/3 of what ME takes). As for - say mandrake 9.1 , I wouldn't run it an anything slower than a P450 with al *least* 128 meg ram and 5 gig or better HD.

[blackbelt_jones]

Depends of the distro. Red Hat and Mandrake (especially newer versions) ran tragically slow on my older low spec machines, and when I tried to use Open Office things went into suspended animation. However, I've had great results from Debian, and an old Debian-based distro, Storm Linux. I got a Debian box with 64 MB RAM next to a Windows box with 128MB RAM, and the performance I'm getting from the two is pretty comparable, in my opinion

[chatins]

Stormix did great debian Linux. I used the rainware version for beginers back in 99. Way ahead of its time.

I use RH8 on my desktop for scaning, printing, editing,dvd burning, etc. Xine is great for movies.

[shadowrider]

Originally posted by bproffitt
It's not Linux that's slow, per se, it's the desktop environments that run atop it, IMHO.

As soon as I upgraded to GNOME2, I had to upgrade my machine as well.

Peace,
Brian Proffitt
i agree on that

[Gaxus]

Windows (98) for me runs a lot faster (excluding booting).

Yet, general menu opening,window moving,file browsing, running programs, etc runs faster. Not to mention internet explorer, which loads in less than a second and yet displays webpages amazingly.

I currently run openbox, nvidia drivers and use mozilla firebird (loads in around 4-5 secs) on my Debian distro...... with custom compiled 2.4.21 kernel,..... p733, 128mb ram,swapspace,hdparm configured/etc..... yet it is still slower than windows... visible chunking when moving windows opaquely, same deal when scrolling through menus using highlighting, etc.

I have an idea why linux isn't fast and it's gotta do with the lack of standards when it comes to GUIs.... i mean what? Gtk, gtk2, qt, tk, etc,etc all with a bunch of libraries makes it hard to make em function together in a fast, nice, cohesive manner.... although it's great customability wise, it's a bit of a nightmare.

[chucksaysword2]

I have a PII 350mhz with 256 MB RAM running Debian Sid and I feel that it is faster than Windows used to be. KDE is usable albeit a little slow and SuperKaramba is just plain snail-like. Gnome 2.2 with some decent eye candy (transparent panel) runs pretty smoothly. Flux/Blackbox run great.

Funny thing is when I had Gentoo installed KDE ran slower than it does now. :eek:

[iGuy]

I think that there is something to the small app argument being made.

In fact, I think that is one reason that I like Linux. Bloat code is out there. And, unfortunately, it has, and is still making its way into Linux as well. Bloat code introduces both slow processing and undocumented bugs. The original UNIX philosophy was to have every program just do one thing, and do it well. Fortunately, in Linux you can still choose that type of application, if you wish.

For those who want feature rich code, it is there too. Hence, you have the choice. But you can't have it both ways. Unless, you are a better programmer then... well unless you are really good.

I think that 'Easter eggs', translation from everything, spyware, and backward compatibility till B.C. only makes our lives worse -- in any platform. But it seems that that is what people want, or at least will put up with. {nah, nah: ended a sentence in a preposition}

The original UNIX philosophy was to have small, simple, single purpose code, that was able to be debugged.

I still think that that is the way to go. Let the browser browse -- but I will use another program to mail. The word processor processes, but graphics are managed elsewhere. Just do what you are designed to do, and hand the interface over to another.

Sorry, I am showing my age.

[deanrantala]

point well stated:) ......

[sarah31]

Originally posted by Gaxus
Windows (98) for me runs a lot faster (excluding booting).

Yet, general menu opening,window moving,file browsing, running programs, etc runs faster. Not to mention internet explorer, which loads in less than a second and yet displays webpages amazingly.

I currently run openbox, nvidia drivers and use mozilla firebird (loads in around 4-5 secs) on my Debian distro...... with custom compiled 2.4.21 kernel,..... p733, 128mb ram,swapspace,hdparm configured/etc..... yet it is still slower than windows... visible chunking when moving windows opaquely, same deal when scrolling through menus using highlighting, etc.

I have an idea why linux isn't fast and it's gotta do with the lack of standards when it comes to GUIs.... i mean what? Gtk, gtk2, qt, tk, etc,etc all with a bunch of libraries makes it hard to make em function together in a fast, nice, cohesive manner.... although it's great customability wise, it's a bit of a nightmare.

um because you are running i386 optimized packages.

ie renders terribly if you explored writing clean standard html you find that IE has absolutely not concept of how to handle real HTML. add to that if you run any gecko engine browser on any platform expect slow launch times but i can tell you without a shadow of doubt i would much rather use gecko engine browsers than IE. IE is years behind the game of building good web browsers.

everything i do in linux i can do faster than i did in XP or Win98. Added to that i don't get the crashes while and app is running like i commonly do in applications on our windows computer at work.

oh and linux isn't fast because there is no standard gui toolkit? Please:rolleyes: it is not gui toolkits that make something slow it is how the underlying code is handled. gui toolkits in linux are ugly but they are not your problem.

[willoughbyva]

I have a pretty decent machine to start off with, but for me Mandrake 9.1 runs faster than Mandrake 8.2 or 9.0.

You might want to try one of the less bloated window managers like others have suggested.

Also I can watch a divix movie in winxp and it consumes over 50%of processor resources. I can watch the same movie with mplayer in linux and it consumes about 33% or less processor resources.

[Gaxus]

Originally posted by sarah31
um because you are running i386 optimized packages.

ie renders terribly if you explored writing clean standard html you find that IE has absolutely not concept of how to handle real HTML. add to that if you run any gecko engine browser on any platform expect slow launch times but i can tell you without a shadow of doubt i would much rather use gecko engine browsers than IE. IE is years behind the game of building good web browsers.

everything i do in linux i can do faster than i did in XP or Win98. Added to that i don't get the crashes while and app is running like i commonly do in applications on our windows computer at work.

oh and linux isn't fast because there is no standard gui toolkit? Please:rolleyes: it is not gui toolkits that make something slow it is how the underlying code is handled. gui toolkits in linux are ugly but they are not your problem.

Yeah, that library stuff was just my uninformed guess. What I was thinking is that if different developers are using different GUIs to make programs, isn't it harder to make them intergrate well with each other? I guess not???:

Can you elaborate on what you mean by the underlying code in this case? :confused:

Can you tell me of the really fast, powerful browser like iexplore that you use? Do you think compiling firebird with i686 optimisations et al will make it faster than iexplore in windows?

Iexplore can't handle 'real' HTML? (whatever that is). That must be a joke, seeing that all the pages I've visited in both mozilla and iexplore display more or less the same save for slight differences in fonts,etc! So how exactly can't iexplore handle 'real' html?

The only desktop environments/wm that I can see that matches win98 in speed and quality is windowmaker and fvwm/95 (any more?) and yet they don't have anything when it comes to graphical file and desktop managing.... if I want that I have to use KDE or GNOME, and we all now how slow they are. Do you know any other desktop environments that do this well?...

OOPS... haha, that kind of degraded into a general rant... oh well :D

[blackbelt_jones]

Originally posted by chatins
Stormix did great debian Linux. I used the rainware version for beginers back in 99. Way ahead of its time.


BTW, Storm Linux is still available from

http://www.cheapbytes.com

for the price of 1 dollar! Which, I would wager, is less than one per cent of the cost of that nasty old Windows XP! (Shipping not included.)

[slipperyfish]

one thing windows does on a superficial level is give you something to look at while it's busy. through my (so far brief ) time using linux i haven't seen many splash screens, loading bars or half loaded apllications (or half loaded desktops!)... distracted-while-u-wait. with linux you seem to be able to use the application, etc as soon as you can see it, without risking problems. which is nice.

it only takes an application to appear a second before it's ready, to give the impression of better speed. all this filters down into your general perception of a machine.

[deanrantala]

I think the concept of a seperate gui running over a base system (as linux does) is far supirior. One of the strongest points to this is that *if* it crashes, it rarely brings the whole OS down with it.(a very, very bad problem under win 9x based OS's). In fact, I don't ever recall having to restart the whole PC because of a program that crashed.Also, most gui's in linux DO use a uniform base - the x server. If something was biult for, say, KDE - it will still run under gnome or even windowmaker or so. Most window managers simply are an interface (with varying degrees of functionality) to the *uniform* x window system.

[Stween]

Originally posted by deanrantala
I think the concept of a seperate gui running over a base system (as linux does) is far supirior. One of the strongest points to this is that *if* it crashes, it rarely brings the whole OS down with it.

No, this is not why one component failing can bring down the entire system. If one component fails, the operating system should still schedule timeslices around it, and terminate or allow the user to terminate the process - if it is completely isolated from every other process, which isn't all *that* tricky, the system should not fail.

[deanrantala]

Originally posted by Stween
No, this is not why one component failing can bring down the entire system. If one component fails, the operating system should still schedule timeslices around it, and terminate or allow the user to terminate the process - if it is completely isolated from every other process, which isn't all *that* tricky, the system should not fail.

Please correct me if I'm wrong ('m *trying* to learn c++), but windows doesn't run many apps seperately as linux does, everything with windows seems so tightly knit and integrated - such as the "desktop" - and I have always belived this has been a major cause of problems....

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by deanrantala
Please correct me if I'm wrong ('m *trying* to learn c++), but windows doesn't run many apps seperately as linux does, everything with windows seems so tightly knit and integrated - such as the "desktop" - and I have always belived this has been a major cause of problems.... Correct, but only with respect to two things.

The GUI in all versions of Windows is very tightly integrated into the kernel. Which is sort of good, in that it gives a VERY small speed boost, but it's also VERY bad, in that your GUI, if it screws up, can take down the kernel. It's hard for the kernel to schedule timeslices around a stuck process when the kernel itself is hosed. :D

The NT versions of Windows, though, seem to be quite a bit better at having the GUI not hose the kernel. Oh, sure, they're still just as tightly integrated, but NT4 and 2K seem to cough and die quite a lot less than any version of 9x ever did.

Then, there's what happens when your comctl32.dll gets screwed up, in pretty much any version of Windows. You get no GUI whatsoever -- luckily, there's a rescue console in 2K, and DOS mode in 95 and 98, but I can't think of any way you'd fix NT, XP (unless it has a rescue console?), or ME at all, without a separate bootdisk.

And very few of the programs that Windows runs are very tightly integrated into the kernel. They can be pretty tightly-knit to each other, using COM, but COM is one of the (few) things that appears to actually work halftway-decently, at least in my experience.

[hyp_spec]

i've been using linux for a year now. It runs very well on my 533mhz celeron / 256mb of RAM. i can do everything faster in linux but one thing ---> ripping mp3's. This is a major concern for me... Grip will rip in mp3 in 50mins (OUCH) but with wine/cdex it can be done in less the 20 mins... Gnome2 runs great on my system thanks to Droplines new 2.2.3 release (i686 optimized) it flies compared to 2.2.2 which to me was way unusable... Firebird though still a little slow I'm pleased with page rendering. Pages load fast, i'd like a native GTK2 interface but galeon doesnt cut it.. too... much... rambling.... peace... out...

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Jo.Mo.
I meant in the general sense, i've been forced to use Windows for the past few days because i'm in between Distros, and i can't figure out what to do with it. in linux you can do whatever you feel like, but when i hop onto my windows partition i end up just staring at the screen, thinking how much it would cost me to go buy some software to put on it to actually make it useful.


It wouldn't cost much if anything at all....Go to someplace like
http://www.shellcity.net and peruse their huge archive of win freeware. Make sure to use their search feature to really get to the heart of the site. There are tons of other freeware sites around too.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by deanrantala
Please correct me if I'm wrong ('m *trying* to learn c++), but windows doesn't run many apps seperately as linux does, everything with windows seems so tightly knit and integrated - such as the "desktop" - and I have always belived this has been a major cause of problems....


Look into the shell "Litestep" for some alternatives.