Why is RH8 so slow with X Window

[pmesjar]

Ok, I can't figure this out by myself, nor I can find it anywhere. I'm running Red Hat 8 linux on my Toshiba Satellite 1805-S253 notebook. Its stats:
PIII 850 Mhz
14 Gb Toshiba HDD, DMA supported
Graphics Card Trindent Cyberblade Ai1, 8MB shared memory
128 MB RAM
I don't think other parameters matter, if do, I'll give them. Running Linux and WinXP dual boot (LILO), Linux is set up on its own partition with ext3fs, swap is configured for 250MB.

The problem is that my X Window is very very slow. For OpenOffice it takes about a minute to two to start up, any window I want to open it takes about 5-10 seconds to open {does not matter if I use KDE or GNOME, or if it contains 1 or couple more objects). When I want to copy files, the speed of copying is only about 2-to-3 MB per sec (with DMA on, strange). I checked kernel if DMA support is enabled - it was by default. Also when displaying info with hdparm, DMA was set to on. I tried to pass kernel some special parameters, like ide0=autotune, even used hdparm - but still no success. When I try to time the copy times with hdparm (hdparm -T -t /dev/hda), the first number is about 65 MB per sec, the second is about 10 MB per sec. But what sound strange to me about my HDD is that when I print info with hdparm -i it prints that buffer available is 0. Can't this be the source of the problem? If it is, is there some other IDE driver I can use in my system? Or is there any other possibilities (like maybe tweaking the ext3fs with tune2fs, which I do not know for now how to do) I should consider before completely turning of X Window on my notebook? Thank you guys all in advance Peter Mesjar
CCNA, A+ certified
pmesjar@centrum.sk

 

[RaoulDuke]

I don't know much about the hdparm stuff but i can tell you RedHat8 comes as a very bloated system, especially if you're using either gnome or kde as your window manger.

Try disabling all the services you don't use and cutting down on fancy 'eye candy' desktop features.

It took me a few weeks of tweaking to get my RH8 box running smoothly. Try using some of the admin tools to see what services are running in the background and deciede if you really need them.

Other thing you could do is switch to a 'lighter' window manager like fluxbox or enlighenment

p.s. Open Office actually loads all modules when you first start it. this means that even when your system is running quite quickly, it will still take a while to open the first open office app of the day.

 

[Newposter]

I just installed Redhat on a PII-233MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 3.0GB 5400 RPM drive - now that's slow!

I plan to become proficient in the command shell to avoid the GUI when I don't need it. Only other alternative is to get a new, high-powered box. Newposter
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

 

[pmesjar]

Thank you guys, but what about that slow copy file rate? Copying files when DMA is enabled cannot be at 3MB per second, that is awfully slow. HDD with DMA enabled can do a lot better Peter Mesjar
CCNA, A+ certified
pmesjar@centrum.sk

 

[hyperdaz]

I would advise a little more ram in your machine...

for instance on my test machine I have p2 450 and all spare parts from other machines but with 384MB of ram..

Todays install is Mandrake9.0 the other weeks was Redhat8 and I did not find any problems with speed... Infact its bloody fast..

If you take knoppix for an example you can run everything with 128 but the more pysical memory you have then the faster things are....

256 or as high as you can aford basicly... IMHO

 

[zeland]

I too would advice that you have about 384MB of RAM to run X comfortably although you could still get away with 256MB. At 384MB, I hardly ever touch my swap memory (unless I have a few spredsheets running in OpenOffice), saves me alot of disk trashing.

 

[pmesjar]

Thank you all guys, I'll go with the memory upgrade. While diging deeper into this problem I found couple other suprising things, notably about my hardware. So the problem is solved) Peter Mesjar
CCNA, A+ certified
pmesjar@centrum.sk

 

[zeland]

If you would be so kind, what did you find out about your hardware anyway?