[CLUE-Tech] Slow XWindow :-(

[Collins]

On 15 Dec 2002 11:55:18 -0700 Ed Hill <ed at eh3.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 09:48, Marcin wrote:
> > Dnia nie 15. grudzien 2002 06:14, Warren Raquel napisal:
> > 
> > > Do you have the 'mem=nopentium' option set when you boot? If not
> > > try it and see what happens.
> > No, I don't, but when I've added it nothing changed :-( My
> > XWindowd are still slow. I've added this option into
> > /etc/lilo.conf (append="mem=nopentium") When I boot my Linux,
> > system see all RAM. My Linux's got 94 MB of RAM available. Look at
> > first lines of my /var/log/dmesg :
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > I've also tryed add "mem=96M" otpion. (96 is size of my RAM - 96
> > MB).
> 
> 
> Hi Marcin,
> 
> KDE is a resource hog.  It takes up a fair amount of both memory and
> cycles, so its not surprising that a 233Mhz system with 96Meg RAM is
> a bit slow.  Ways of speeding things up (in order of increasing
> price) are:
> 
>   1) Turn off programs/daemons that you don't need.  After an 
>      install I always go into the startup scripts (/etc/rc#.d/)
>      and shut off services that I don't need.  For instance, 
>      turning off apache can free up a fair amount of RAM.  I 
>      have little experience with KDE but I'm sure there are 
>      options that you can tweak to make it leaner.  Perhaps 
>      others can help you with this...?
> 
>   2) Buy more RAM.  If KDE and its programs are digging into 
>      swap (which is likely at 96Meg) then an upgrade will 
>      probably give a noticeable boost for a relatively 
>      small cost.
> 
>   3) Upgrade the CPU.  If its possible, I'd upgrade the CPU 
>      only after first upgrading RAM since I think its more 
>      likely that your system is constrained by the memory.
> 

The times you cited are not too much out of line for that machine. 
When I ran a K6II/300Mz unit, I saw times like 40 seconds to start kde
or any other really big program.  Here are some thoughts:

1) Upgrades as above.

2) Consider using something like xfce for the window manager and
sylpheed for mail.  I've got a powerful enough machine to support kde
(or gnome) - PIII/800Mz, but I have yet to find anything that kde
provides that I can't do without.

Wszystkiego najlepszego!

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
Gentoo 1.4 sytem