Mandrake Linux: Why so slow?

[boardtrick]

I decided to put Mandrake Linux on one of my test machines to give it a try. I loaded it up and fell in love with the OS before I could even get it from the workshop bench to it's perminant spot on my desk. The only problem is that it is on a PII 400mHz machine w/ 64mByte of RAM. I figured that this setup would be fine for linux even though it is not very fast. My problem is extremely long boot times and long program startup times...

Normally (with a windows OS) I would start to benchmark, etc...to try and find the bottleneck...but considering that i've heard of people using linux, freeBSD, and other unix derivatives on old 486dx processors...I don't think that my system is the problem. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

 

[n0cmonkey]

64MB of RAM is one problem. Its enough, but you should expect things to be slow. Another problem is that Mandrake is known to be a little bloated. If you want something faster go with RedHat (a little faster), Slackware, or Debian (both of the last two are much faster). X is also a little slow, but the options you have using it make up for that slowdown. You can also try applying some of the preemptive patches and whatnot to speed up desktop type of things, but they dont necessarily make the server side of things faster.

 

[boardtrick]

i figured that the 64mb had something to do with it. I am new to linux and had heard that mandrake was a good way to get into linux. i'm not planning on using it as a server anytime soon but possibly a firewall. i think i might try debian next. thanks...

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< i figured that the 64mb had something to do with it. I am new to linux and had heard that mandrake was a good way to get into linux. i'm not planning on using it as a server anytime soon but possibly a firewall. i think i might try debian next. thanks... >>


the ram is probably the main problem, especially running something like KDE or gnome.

 

[NorthenLove]

Have you tried BlackBox or Window Maker ?

 

[Tiger]

Using boot times to judge the overall speed of an OS is a mistake.
Linux isn't made to booted and re-booted like some windows variants.
Get used to using Mandrake doing a couple of installs and you'll learn to cut some of the fat out.

 

[EHobaX]

Yeah, I run Mandrake 8.2 at work on a 166Mhz w/ 96 MB of RAM.
It runs great from CL. KDE was an impossibilty, so I use Fluxbox.
Everything runs fine. It's not blistering fast, but you got to remember
that Win 3.x and 95 weren't super fast either!

 

[boardtrick]

Thanks for the advice. And Tiger, your right about the installs...after a few times I'm starting to get a feel for which progs bogg me down during the boot. Also, I decided to use neither gnome or kde, but window maker. Plus, i searched through all of my spare parts and now have 128mb of ram in there. unfortuanately, the ram is all different kinds so i might loose a little performance there but oh well, i've noticed an increase nevertheless. Thanks again for the help!

 

[Abzstrak]

also do a man on hdparm and get familiar with it, can speed U up considerably.

 

[boardtrick]

<< also do a man on hdparm and get familiar with it, can speed U up considerably. >>



Meaning...? (Sorry I'm new to linux...)

 

[Abzstrak]

open a terminal window and do a man on hdparm, by typing "man hdparm"

I cant tell U what command exactly to type cause it depends on your hardware.

 

[boardtrick]

oh i get it...thanks

 

[pm]

I've noticed that "innd" - the Internet news daemon - is running by default and take up a fair amount of CPU while it updates... which can take a while. Removing this out of init can speed things up a lot.

Open a console window, type "top" and it will show what programs are running and consuming resources. If "innd" is at the top when things are chugging and you don't care about Usenet news, switch to root and move innd out of /etc/rc.d/init.d

 

[boardtrick]

ah...very cool...i'll check that out

 

[manly]

I found the same problem with KDE and GNOME (and their apps) having ridiculous load times, even though the CPU wasn't doing much work. xterm opened up quickly though, so it was almost certainly a configuration issue.

In this case, Mandrake 8.2 was setting up the network interface eth0 by DHCP. However, it did not add the real hostname to /etc/hosts and I don't run BIND. Simple solution is to add the correct entry to /etc/hosts, i.e.

192.168.100.128 mandrake82.boardtrick.com mandrake82

KDE2 and GNOME are working properly now.

 

[fivepesos]

run top or ps (man top, man ps if u dont know what they do). and see what is taking up most of the resources. then kill it. man kill.

kde and gnome will be acceptable on a p2-400 in my opinion if u have ram>128mb or so. plus mandrake is usually realy bloated. try slackware, debian, or even suse. anything is faster than mandrake. when u learn a little more try the preemptive kernel patch (search on google should give u good results). its speedy.

windowmaker will be blazing on a p2-400. my experience is this, my main linux box is a dual 500mhz celeron box with 384mb sdram. not to speedy but gotta love the cheap dual goodness. windowmaker runs great on my setup, ximian gnome runs kinda slow, and i havent tried kde in a while. although kde3 looks good, im gonna try it.

ram is cheap too, go out and buy a 256mb module of pc100 and be down with it.

 

[boardtrick]

yeah i thought to but some more ram except for the fact that I am saving to build another comp right now, and the pII 400 is a picky IBM machine that has trouble accepting different types of ram