Not signed in (Sign In)

Vanilla 1.1.4 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

This discussion has been inactive for longer than 28 days, and is thus closed.

General Linux Discussion: Distribution Speed

Bottom of Page

1 to 28 of 28

  1.  
    • CommentAuthorcigan
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    Ok, so a friend of mine helped me with some hardware problems I was having with an old Dell box. So I now have a first gen Pentium 4 with 256 megs of ram that I have put Xubuntu on. It is slow like molassas. I did the domain name tweak, and it helped some, but it is still far less responsive than it was with XP. I put Compiz Fusion on it, and the rendering runs beautifully, but it takes forever for anything to load into memory enough to realize that any rendering should be going on. And browser speed without compiz fusion isn't much better.

    So my question is, what distros, preferably with apt-get could people recommend for speed. I want this to be a file/apache server and a desktop. I've been in the ubuntu camp for a while, so I don't have as much experience with other distros as I'd like, but this comp obviously needs some love from somewhere else.

    Thanks.
    • CommentAuthortorerling
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    someone told me debian net install is quite fast, build a system from scratch, so that's if you have to have apt-get. If you want lean speed and manage with packman (a great packetmanager) so try arch linux ;) it's a great chice :)
    • CommentAuthorSebulba
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    Debian is VERY nice and light too. Get the 1st CD only, and do a basic net install, then add the other stuff later as you need it. Your default DE will be (a rather tasty implementation of) Gnome. I am using a P4 256mb RAM too, and Debian is VERY resource friendly, packages open and close very quick. Debian is also a LOT more stable than distros like Ubuntu, but the trade off is often older versions of packages. I've only been using it for less than a week, but would consider myself "infected" with Debian.....it's really hard not to like when you try it.
    • CommentAuthorVogateer
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    I've also used Debian on an old G3 Mac with 192 MB of RAM, and I thought XFCE ran pretty well. It obviously wasn't blazing, but it was much better than Ubuntu, which does seem to be more resource heavy. Also, I noticed that the final release of XFCE 4.4 was much faster and easier on resources than any of the beta builds that led up to it.
    •  
      CommentAuthorJay
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007 edited
     
    You do know that debian is ubuntu right?


    You need to tweak the services you have booting. Start taking stuff out that doesn't need to be there. 256megs isn't enough memory to do much of anything. Windows XP would run like crap on that too. Make sure you have a swap partition too.

    A little more than a dell desktop would help you more I would expect. Building a linux box from scratch the debian way is a mistake. Start with ubuntu and start trimming it down.
    • CommentAuthorVogateer
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    Yes, we know that Ubuntu is based on Debian, and we also know that Ubuntu makes many modifications as well, and experience tells many of us that Debian—likely because they don't make all those modifications—is much lighter on resources.

    I don't see how installing Debian would be a mistake, the Debian installer has worked well for me, so long as you can get through a text-based installer, and it's debatable that it's better to start with too much and trim down as opposed to starting light and adding only what you want. I usually find it less time consuming and I'm more satisfied with the results when I build up Debian than I am when I strip down Ubuntu, and I do use both. You're free to make your recommendation just like we are, but these choices are just preferences, there's really no right or wrong.
    • CommentAuthorSebulba
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007 edited
     
    Start high and strip down, or vice versa.....both have their place. You could argue that the "give lots of programs by default and let the user delete the stuff they don't want" is the M$ mindset we all love to hate, also shared by the retailers who get discounts for adding pre-installed trial-ware stuff. Personally I like the Debian approach (it's been a while since I've seen this approach) of asking which type of use the PC will be put, and a simple * next to "web server" or "desktop" will install the software packages needed works great. Offhand, I believe there are a total of about 9 options......it's not rocket science.

    For me, the difference between Ubuntu and Debian is stability. I found out the other day that Ubuntu is based on the unstable version of Debian. For most stuff this is fine, I found the continuing Firefox crashes too much to put up with. Add to the fact that I have to run a script with sudo just to unmount a USB hard drive......a known issue months ago and another one added to the list of "not fixed yet". Ubuntu is certainly the fastest growing distro, which counts for a lot. This means that packages will appear quickly in the Ubuntu repositories. For most users the packages they use will be stable enough....but if there are one or two packages you need (like Firefox....I feel lost surfing with any other browser) which seem hell bent on crashing all the time, with no end in sight.....there's only so much you can take before your patience snaps and you look for an alternative. The logical "alternative" with all of the "good" points, and none of the "bad" is Debian.

    As far as the amount of memory is concerned, I found Debian, Ubuntu (when I used it), PCLinuxOS and XP Pro ALL to be fine with 256mb. They all had swap partitions / files. All the Linux distros worked fine in both KDE and Gnome. Of course if you want 5 or 6 CPU or RAM intensive programs open at once, it'll give you issues when switching between them...but for most stuff, it's fine. Of course "more = better" but for some users, they don't need "more".......switching AWAY from M$ has freed them from that mindset.

    My main limitation from my RAM is virtual PC's. I can run a VERY light distro like DSL as a virtual PC, but it's not great. It works smoothly enough but can be slow in switching between virtual and normal windows. Puppy Linux is workable too.....much more than that and it grinds to a stop.

    I did notice my last temporary (guided - full hard drive) install of Ubuntu didn't sort a swap partition, or didn't make it active (not sure which). It was unbelievably sllllllllloooooooooowwwwwwwwwww at doing ANYTHING. With one, it's great.

    Debian is also rather unusual with Iceweasel and Icedove instead of Firefox and Thunderbird.....same packages, different name and icon. For a little while this felt "wrong" to me, but now I kinda like the exclusivity.....all the "pro's" in a "special package". Just don't freak out if you install Debian and wonder where Firefox is.....it's there under a different name (witness protection program for packages). You can change it back if you can't live with Iceweasel and Icedove.
  8.  
    Posted By: JayYou do know that debian is ubuntu right?
    You have the distros backwards. Saying Ubuntu is Debian is even only half right. It's like saying the child is the parent (which obviously isn't true.)

    Myself, I'd prefer to start with a stripped down distro and build up. My reasoning could easily go both way, so mostly it just boils down to that's how I've always done things.
    • CommentAuthortorerling
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    You should try arch, it's really great :) If you are OK with pacman
  10.  
    I find that Fedora works well too. It offers both methods of setting up Fedora. You could go the all to nothing way, or the nothing to all way (as I describe the two logistics for software loading with OS)
    • CommentAuthorEDDIE
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    Xubuntu slow on a p4 machine???? Sounds like a swap hard or drive problem. I run xubuntu on a p3-500 and it is fast as most p4's with xp.
    • CommentAuthorTechGeek
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    First off, 256 Megs of ram is the absolute minimum you can run modern KDE or Gnome in. You really need to have 512 if you want decent performance. Else you need to go to a really light WM like xfce or something like that.
    • CommentAuthorkrudlad00
    • CommentTimeSep 27th 2007
     
    Posted By: losinggeneration
    Posted By: JayYou do know that debian is ubuntu right?
    You have the distros backwards. Saying Ubuntu is Debian is even only half right. It's like saying the child is the parent (which obviously isn't true.)...


    I believe the context was "You do know that Ford is Mercury right?" That or a troll/joke... but not a mistake.... but back on topic... come on! ram is free.. slap an extra stick in there already. Also, xubuntu runs fairly well on my PII 350... (without desktop effects of course).. but I agree with EDDIE, might be some other problem.
    • CommentAuthortorerling
    • CommentTimeSep 28th 2007
     
    <blockquote><cite>Posted By: EDDIE</cite>Xubuntu slow on a p4 machine???? Sounds like a swap hard or drive problem. I run xubuntu on a p3-500 and it is fast as most p4's with xp.</blockquote>xubuntu runs much slower on my machine than other XFCEs not that it's butt slow, but it certainly doesnt run as smoth as arch, zenwalk or vector
    • CommentAuthorEDDIE
    • CommentTimeSep 28th 2007
     
    I am on an old amd 1.5 with f6/kde and it is more than fast enough for me. I do have half a gig ram though.
  16.  
    First kill the Beryl. See how big a difference that makes.

    Next, for safety's sake, check your dmesg and /var/log/messages to make sure you don't have a physical problem (like a bad sector on your drive). I'd then run top and sort by memory usage (shift-m) and keep that running in the background. I'd disable all unecessary services (like httpd).

    Don't expect much for bling on that system if you actually want to get work done. I was on a 586 laptop with 128M ram for a while and XFCE was the solution. I however, did have to do some things to trim down ram usage that I didn't have to do on a machine since I was running a 200Mhz slackware server. A very good start is to look up suggestions for increasing battery life on a linux laptop--basically, doing things like disabling syslog and any other services (updatedb, beagled) that constantly access your disk in the background help a lot. I also saved a lot of ram by turning off scrollback buffers in my rxvt's and xterms. Gnome-Term gobbles *titanic* amounts of ram for a shell, and if you go transparent-background with it, that's the bed you made. Ram ain't free.

    The next most important thing is habits: if you're used to browsing with a 36 tabs open in firefox, you're going to swap constantly. You might look into firefox settings like "free memory on minimize". Other browsers might actually use less ram than FF, check that out. Thunderbird and Evo take *titanic* ram if you've got dozens of accounts and thousands of messages. Squirrelmail was the fastest way to read my mail on my cut-down laptop, actually.

    Other ways of managing ram is to--once you've cut down the services you don't actually need, configure the ones you use to have short connection timeouts and not to start a bazillion copies. Like Amavis and SpamAssassin and imapd. You can force these to run just one process and not 10, because you've prolly only got one other person accessing your server.

    I've had problems with Beryl pegging my CPUs on 1.7Ghz laptop, I finally just gave it up. I couldn't get the cpu scaling to reduce the clocking because something in Beryl was polling, which chewed my battery real quick. So I just gave that up. I love Beryl, but it doesn't actually help me work faster (even tho I'd like to think it does). The same theory goes for desktop applets...gkrellm and docklet thingies spend cycles, too. Go back to top and see what's hogging your system.

    I'm surprised that I was so productive for so long with a 200Mhz with 256M ram. I lived out of fvwm2 and had like eight desktops filled with rxvt windows (but just one browser session) almost all the time. I also had a dedicated modem line. That rocked!
    • CommentAuthorEDDIE
    • CommentTimeOct 1st 2007
     
    htop.....
    •  
      CommentAuthorwyth
    • CommentTimeOct 2nd 2007 edited
     
    Posted By: Sebulba: "Add to the fact that I have to run a script with sudo just to unmount a USB hard drive......a known issue months ago and another one added to the list of 'not fixed yet.'"

    What's this? What version are you running? At least since Feisty, I've been able to plug in any USB, right-click and unmount it from the context menu, no script or sudo necessary.
    •  
      CommentAuthorwyth
    • CommentTimeOct 2nd 2007
     
    Is there a good guide available that describes what services generally get loaded and what are or are not necessary?

    There was an Ubuntu one from a couple years back, but it's outdated and no longer very useful.

    This page may help, but use with some common sense care (I've had no trouble, but didn't implement everything):
    http://blog.lxpages.com/2007/04/24/ubuntu-performance-guides/
    • CommentAuthorSebulba
    • CommentTimeOct 2nd 2007 edited
     
    The last (by Ubuntu standards) stable version 7.04. I kinda have a thing about not using an unstable distro as a working OS. It still requires that script (as of about 2 weeks ago when I last used it). It may be fixed in the new Ubuntu, for me it was just one of a whole heap of reasons not to use Ubuntu. When I say "script" I mean a single line command I wrote to make it quicker than typing it every time. Technically it "did" unmount....it just immediately mounted itself again.
    • CommentAuthorcigan
    • CommentTimeOct 3rd 2007
     
    Ok. I'm going to respond to several things listed in this thread. I recently changed jobs and haven't kept up on it as well as I would like to have.

    1 Applications: I don't run much. I installed KDE because my fiance really wanted to be able to run Amarok, and it took 5 million years to load on XFCE. Once I was in KDE without Compiz Fusion runnings things improved A Little. So we have been using that as there are several K applications we use, and it just makes sense to run them in KDE. The added overhead hurts XFCE more than just using KDE from the start. We don't generally have more than 2 accounts in Thunderbird, and a maximum of I'd say 10 tabs in Firefox, and it's rare to hit 10. 5-6 is my fiance's average, and 2-4 is mine.

    2 Services: I do not have a lot of experiencing turning off specific startup services. I do want to run this as an apache server and an SSH server for my fiance to store his website on. We are going to IP forward through our cable system. It gives me access to a PHP/MySQL server to futz around with during down time at work and begin to really teach myself SQL and PHP. It doesn't need to run quickly or handle more than 2-3 people accessing it at once, so I'm not worried about that. I've run these services on MUCH slower machines. It's just when we're home we would also like the computer to work as a desktop.

    I will look into the Ubuntu startup services and see what I can disable. Thanks for the input. I really appreciate it all.
  22.  
    If you're running XFCE and K desktop items then you're loading the Gnome desktop libraries and and K desktop libraries, which would explain the decrease in performance.

    If you get the opportunity to get more RAM for your system, your desktop experience will be oh so much nicer.

    That you've got sshd running on your system, it's little enough load on the system to keep top running in a shell or screen (man screen) so that you can keep tabs on what's taking up the ram and how much swap you're using from work.
  23.  
    Posted By: cigana maximum of I'd say 10 tabs in Firefox, and it's rare to hit 10. 5-6 is my fiance's average, and 2-4 is mine.
    Firefox is a huge memory hog, using something like Konqueror, Epiphany, Dillo, or something would probably help. It's not uncommon here to see Firefox using 300 megs of RAM on my machine, but then again, I don't close it often either. Though, that shouldn't be an excuse for it using that much RAM.
    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    1949 harley 15 0 236m 118m 22m S 0.0 13.4 22:15.85 firefox-bin
    • CommentAuthorVogateer
    • CommentTimeOct 3rd 2007 edited
     
    That looks like it's from top, and note that the "Virt" is not all Firefox:

    Virt: Virtual Size of the task. This includes the size of process's executable binary, the data area and all the loaded shared libraries.

    See for yourself:
    http://www.linuxforums.org/misc/using_top_more_efficiently_3.html

    The shared libraries add quite a bit. Look at Xorg on my machine (no compiz or anything fancy, either):

      PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                              
     5408 root      15   0  507m 186m  10m S    6  9.3  40:41.43 Xorg

    Oh my God! Xorg is such a memory hog. It's just providing the framework for a window manager to do its job and it's taking up 507 Mb of RAM! Between Xorg taking up 500 Mb and Firefox taking up 500 Mb, you need a gig of RAM to surf the Internet, and then you don't have room for anything else! But wait, I have a G3 in my office with 192 Mb, and it runs Xorg, XFCE, and Firefox at the same time... How can that be?

    These numbers are not meaningful unless you really know how top gets the numbers and what the column you're looking at really means. If you read up on it, you realize that actually determining how much RAM each program uses is truly a difficult task. So please don't throw these numbers around lightly while claiming that Firefox is just a beastly memory hog. Sure, Firefox does use a good amount of RAM, and isn't as light as Konqueror, but in my experience it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. It does cache pages that you've been too, and use up available RAM (particularly if the RAM is not doing anything else at the moment). When loading Firefox on a G3 machine with 192 Mb of RAM, and it takes about 10 seconds or so to come up, but once it's running it's fast enough, and it doesn't prevent you from running other programs or start swapping like mad, either, like it would if it truly needed 500 Mb of RAM to do what it does. As far as I can tell Firefox makes relatively smart use of available resources.

    Also, if you're using XFCE, you are loading the gtk libraries, but not the gnome ones, just to avoid confusion for anyone out there that thinks gtk means the gnome toolkit instead of the gimp toolkit.
  25.  
    What about (which is what I generally go by anyways) RES : The size of RAM currently consumed by the task. Swapped out portion of the task is not included.Sure it's hard to determine exactly how much RAM each program is using, but when it's consistently the highest memory user on the system it's statistically using more RAM.
  26.  
    Vogateer: You're right: GTK != Gnome libs. I was being sloppy.

    Good explanation on how to interpret top, too! Love that link. Tonight I took some time to dive into top s'more.

    Below is a pasting of from top on my wee little LogicSupply GS02 mail server. I've obviously got a lot of memory in use by amavis and spamassassin. Running apache, samba, clamd are all pretty small compared to most desktop software. Keeping the max spare workers low in apache helps. I wish I could keep spamd down to one process, tho. I was able to get amavisd down to one process and httpd down to two processes. Some processes, like spamassassin and cyrus-imapd I restart via cron so that I kill off any extra processes and reclaim the memory. I find that imapd instances often hang on old connections for a long time and eat memory but don't die quickly.

    top - 23:03:07 up 80 days,  9:06,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.12, 0.07
    Tasks:  72 total,   1 running,  71 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
    Cpu(s): 10.5% us,  2.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 82.0% id,  5.2% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
    Mem:    223536k total,   179436k used,    44100k free,     4536k buffers
    Swap:  2097144k total,    22020k used,  2075124k free,    49720k cached

      PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                                              
    15229 amavis    16   0 51388  39m 2408 S  0.0 18.0   0:01.94 amavisd                                                                                                                                                                              
    15196 root      16   0 38348  31m 2432 S  0.0 14.4   0:03.54 spamd                                                                                                                                                                                
    15201 root      16   0 38348  29m  736 S  0.0 13.7   0:00.02 spamd                                                                                                                                                                                
    18501 mysql     16   0  125m  16m 3788 S  0.3  7.6  37:10.62 mysqld                                                                                                                                                                               
     3357 root      16   0 29348 9.8m 1012 S  0.0  4.5   4:56.56 clamd                                                                                                                                                                                
    15266 root      16   0 29984 8992 5488 S  0.0  4.0   0:00.99 httpd                                                                                                                                                                                
     2879 ntp       16   0  5988 5988 3444 S  0.0  2.7   0:06.13 ntpd                                                                                                                                                                                 
    15271 apache    25   0 29984 4468  956 S  0.0  2.0   0:00.00 httpd                                                                                                                                                                                
    15273 cyrus     16   0 34080 3656 2828 S  7.6  1.6   0:00.23 imapd


    I find that I can just barely work in 256M anymore. Actually, I was on a similar dev server, 256M ram, with mysql and 5 httpd workers and I fired up vim and did a search and it was like...swapping just to complete the regex in vim. OMG. Like, when was the last time you had to wait for vim? And yoinks! Don't hang around while YUM is doin' it's nasty thing. Log off to give it that precious ram so it can complete!
    • CommentAuthorVogateer
    • CommentTimeOct 4th 2007 edited
     
    Posted By: losinggenerationWhat about (which is what I generally go by anyways)RES : The size of RAM currently consumed by the task. Swapped out portion of the task is not included.Sure it's hard to determine exactly how much RAM each program is using, but when it's consistently the highest memory user on the system it's statistically using more RAM.


    Yeah, Firefox does use a lot of RAM, but given how important web browsing is to me, I don't mind it taking up a good chunk of RAM to make the experience a pleasant one. I just want to make sure people don't throw numbers around willy nilly, because programs like top just give you a really simplistic idea of what's going on.

    If you're still upset about Firefox using RAM, which it's designed to do if the RAM is available by caching all the pages you visit so you can move really quickly through your history, you can go in and set something up in about:config:
    How to reduce the memory usage on Firefox (Look at "assign memory cache")

    Then for memory you can enter this in the toolbar:
    about:cache?device=memory

    But honestly, I don't notice Firefox slowing down my system at all, and I really like being able to speed back and forth through my history. If my system's not using the RAM, and Firefox can make use of it, then I say go right ahead.

    Jed's right, though. Working with anything less than 256 can be awfully painful, unless you're using something like Puppy Linux, which still impresses me all the time. I love that distro.
  28.  
    The new Ksysguard (in KDE 4.0) has a rather smart view, compared to the old one at least. This one shows what's going on much more clearly, and it might give a hand in deciding which app is huge and which one isn't ;-)

1 to 28 of 28

  1.  

This discussion has been inactive for longer than 28 days, and is thus closed.