On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 06:35 pm, James Gray wrote: > On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 05:52 pm, Rajnish wrote: > > All, > > > > Slight tangent to the current thread. > > > > James Gray wrote: > > > Linux and most other "real" operating systems will take advantage of > > > "unused" RAM and allocate it for disk buffers and disk cache. This is > > > a good thing! The kernel will free up buffers and/or cache as it deems > > > appropriate if an application needs the space. To the end user (or > > > system admin) the whole process is completely transparent and very > > > fast. > > > > I've got a pretty old and still reasonable powerful 450Mhz PC with > > 196MB RAM. It runs all Ubuntu, FC3 and Win2K quite happily. > > > > Firefox startup on Win2K is "noticeably quicker" than either > > of my Linux distros. Is there a way to improve this startup ? > > Firefox/Mozilla startup on Linux/Unix/etc is a dog's breakfast to put it > lightly. > > James
Time to put my money where my mouth is, here's my results from my P3-650 lappy: First load of firefox after a reboot (nothing cached/buffered): $ time firefox real 0m24.774s (ouch - this machine sux!) user 0m4.968s sys 0m0.571s Same again but without the reboot: $ time firefox real 0m7.867s user 0m4.545s sys 0m0.401s And the system's vitals: $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 8 model name : Pentium III (Coppermine) stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 648.006 cache size : 256 KB $ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 515532 kB MemFree: 21248 kB Buffers: 66880 kB Cached: 173800 kB Now the second test again on my AMD64 machine (I'd already loaded Firefox since the last reboot - it was last closed about 30min prior to this test): $ time firefox real 0m1.429s user 0m0.829s sys 0m0.071s ...and the AMD64 vitals: $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 12 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ stepping : 0 cpu MHz : 2002.602 cache size : 512 KB $ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 1024256 kB MemFree: 58332 kB Buffers: 75816 kB Cached: 235580 kB Make of those numbers what you will :) Cheers, James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
