X very slow :mad:

[Slash999]

Hi everyone,
I have tried installing X from several distributions, but it seems very sluggish. I used to run it on a Pentium 100 w/ 64 megs ram so I kind of expected it. (Even though Windows 98 was very fast on this system) Then I decided to see how it runs on a faster computer. So I got my PII-300 w/ 256 megs ram and wiped everything out. Thinking that I used to have Windows 2000 Pro on this system, and it used to fly, I had real high hopes for Linux. But after installing Linux, trying several distributions, I was greatly dissapointed. While IExplorer takes about 1 second to load on Windows 2000, and Word loads in about 2 seconds, openning the filemanager in X takes about 10 seconds. Forte takes about 45 seconds to load in Windows, in Linux it takes a minimum of three minutes. Thinking that it might just be a memory issue (since I am running it as a server), I upgraded the memory to 512 megs. However, this made almost no difference in terms of X performance. Am I missing something. Everything else on my system flies, my CPU and memory utilization for all the daemons are low. Is there some sort of variable/memory configuration that I can modify so that X runs better or is X just flawed? Also, I have heard that there are commercial versions of the X server/client. Do these run any better?

[sixfeetsix]

Iexplorer always takes 1 second to load because it is a main part of windows and is loaded when windows starts...

just to let you know, if u didn't already...

[Slash999]

Hi again,
Just wanted to say that I have tried both Gnome and KDE. In my experience Gnome is quite a bit faster than KDE (what is KDE thinking with Konqueror???). Also, I know that Internet Explorer is preloaded, as are some other programs to help load them up fully much faster. But even Netscape 6.2 loads much faster under Windows than it does under Linux. Also, just stuff like the plan file managers for KDE or Gnome take a long time to load. In addition, is there anyway I can preload certain applications of my choice in X?

[sixfeetsix]

What's are the different Distros youve installed?

[eXtremist]

One thing I noticed about X that makes it REALLY slow is antialiased fonts. To open konqueror with AA fonts turned off takes me about 3 seconds. With AA fonts turned on it takes at least 20 seconds.

Also, have you tried using hdparm to optimize your hard drive? That can speed things up greatly. On my system, bootup time was normally about 2 minutes. When hdparm was used it cut it down to maybe 25 seconds.

What kind of video card do you have?

[Slash999]

Hi again,
I have tried the following distributions: Redhat 7.1, 7.2, Mandrake 8.0, 8.1, Suse 7.1. I don't think antialiasing fonts have too much to do with it... since it was running slow before they became defaulted in distributions (at least I hope they don't since using X without them is unbearable :) ).
Also, is hdparm compatible with ext3? What exactly does hdparm do?

[ 21 November 2001: Message edited by: Slash999 ]

[Molecule Man]

HDParm turns on dma in simple terms.

[z0mbix]

Wny not give blackbox a go. I tried KDE and Gnome on my old Pentium 150MHz with 32MB RAM and they ran far to slow to be useable, KDE being the slowest. I then put blackbox on it and it runs alot faster. I liked it so much I don't use anything else on my main box and my laptop! :cool:

[Malakin]

A lot of people with low end systems seem to like blackbox so that's what I'd recommend even though I haven't tried it myself.

KDE is very slow on low end cpu's no matter how much ram you have or how fast your hard drive is. KDE is my choice as a desktop though :)

[vhg119]

is dma enabled by default in RH 7.2 and drake 8.1 ?

[katanastab]

That seems like a more than reasonable machine for it, I wouldn't know why it wouldn't run faster.
And KDE purrs like a kitten on my Pentium 133 w/ 16MB RAM, but I guess it's because i use KDE 1.1.
Maybe it might be a problem with your video card, but I think if you have that good of a computer you would already have tried that.
I used blackbox for a while on my mandrake box and it runs very fast, so I guess you should try it like the others said.

[DMR]

Hdparm tweaks can seriously speed up disk operations. After following the steps in the Hard Drive Speed Tweak NHF (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/hardware/hdtweak.html), program launches and other operations were much snappier. I wouldn't think hdparm cares about what filesystem you're using, as it's altering lower-level disk parameters.