Sluggish linux system

[dfi]

Pentium 166 MMX with 128mb pc100, running red hat linux and gnome. Performance is very sluggish. I'm wondering if adding another stick of 128mb would help, or if the bottleneck is the cpu.

dfi

edit: btw, I also have a really old vid card (s3 trio64v2/dx).

 

[Derango]

Yea, another stick of memory would help. Try running a less memory intensive window manager, such as fluxbox or blackbox. Gnome isn't really good if you have limited resources.

 

[Travail]

There are a couple of things you can try before spending money:

1. Use one of the system monitors to see what's happening inside your system. If your system is using a lot of Swap, you need more RAM. If the CPU stays near 100% utilization, additional memory may not help as much.

2. Use the "Service Configuration" (that's what the KDE menu calls it) to see if you're running services/daemons that you don't need. You can click on the name to get more information (for some of them, anyway).

Also, you can try turning down your color resolution, if you're running at 24/32 bit color.

 

[fivepesos]

hey to say it, gnome on a pentium 166 will run slow, theres no way around it. windowmaker should be fine, but gnome and kde need more performance. at least windowmaker is cool thought.

 

[Armitage]

You could probably pick up a P200 or 233 for about $5 on eBay.
That would probably help a bit.

 

[Bremen]

First off, 128 MB should be enough, granted, more is always better, but gnome/kde aren't quite as bad as many people make them out to be.

Now, you claim you're running a Pentium 166 with pc100 ram? First off, no pentium ran at a 100MHz bus so the ram isn't at full speed (Pentiums used a 66MHz bus). Second Pentiums were built for edo ram which had latency's at best around 60ns, by contrast sdram comes in around 7ns. So the processor wasn't built with such low latency's in mind. The fact the motherboard allows sdram at all tells me it is probably a super7 board, in which case you should be able to plop a K6-2/3 in there with no problems. If you can indeed do this I highly recommend it, adding more ram will hardly do anything, a nice 450MHz K6-3 will be very noticeable.

 

[afzan]

intel's VX and TX chipsets supported sdram... just because it takes sdram doesn't mean it's a super 7 board..

and also, the first pentium 2 motherboards took edo ram, does that mean that pentium 2's can't take advantage of sdram?

 

[Agamar]

You could always just boot to run level 3 and forego all the graphics. That way all that memory / CPU hogging X stuff won't be chewing up your cycles

 

[manly]

Also, you can't compare apples and oranges to conclude that SDRAM is ~ 10 times faster than EDO.

For an old machine like this, more RAM won't help that much. WindowMaker is a good choice for a window manager. You'd probably be well served using an older distro such as Red Hat 6.2 or SuSE 7.0. Or current Debian should be a reasonable performer.

Finally, not running X-Windows doesn't help much if the purpose of the machine is a low-end desktop PC. If it's a server, then yeah you don't need a GUI (unless you're an MS serf).

Edit:
You may have to enable DMA transfers for the IDE hard drives (using hdparm). This provides a substantial performance increase in disk I/Os.

 

[dfi]

Interesting points brought up by all. I personally doubt that more ram would help much as well. Hrm, I think I'll have to try windowmaker.

Believe it or not, there are actually ppl bidding on pentium 233s on ebay!

dfi

 

[Bremen]

<< intel's VX and TX chipsets supported sdram... just because it takes sdram doesn't mean it's a super 7 board.. >>

True, still, dosn't mean it isn't either ;0)



<< Also, you can't compare apples and oranges to conclude that SDRAM is ~ 10 times faster than EDO. >>

Who said this? I only said that sdram has about 1/10th the latency, this is hardly a controversial statement, as it is very easy to verify. I merely asserted that Intel engineers were not planning for ram technologies like sdram when designing the P5 core. Similarly they couldn't anticipate rdram when designing the P6.

 

[kylef]

If you want to keep Gnome around, use the old Gnome Midnight Commander instead of Nautilus. Nautilus is the worst resource hog I've ever seen. Horrible!

Also, has anyone figured out why:
1. The Gnome help system launches Nautilus just to display a help file (takes about 1 full minute to load on my K6-2 450 with 256 megs of RAM)
2. Once launched, Nautilus decides to take over your desktop and go into "respawn mode"
3. The only way to kill Nautilus at that point seems to be going to the "Browse running programs" button in the Control Panel?

I hate to say it, but all of this software has a LONG way to go...

 

[Armitage]

<< Believe it or not, there are actually ppl bidding on pentium 233s on ebay! >>



Sure, why not.
For a basic e-mail & web machine, a P200 is a reasonable setup, and dirt cheap. I just bought a P233 off eBay a few months ago to set up such a system for a relation. They had an old P150/32MB ram. Bumping that to 96MB/P233 made the system much more responsive for an investment of about $40 (including shipping). Now If I just could've convinced them to go Linux ...

Also, the suggestion to look at your HD DMA modes is very good. Older drives sometimes don't get set to DMA by default.