On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, James McDermott wrote: > I am running RedHat 9 on a Micron Millennia Mme box that has a 233 Mhz > procesor, 256 MB RAM (Max Allowed), and an IBM 6.4 GB Ultra DMA /33 IDE > hard drive. The machine only has linux installed (no windows, no dual > boot).
Before I start, it's important to have realistic expectations when dealing with older hardware. Your memory cap may become an issue, and your hard disk is certainly going to be a performance bottleneck. > When I start an application, it takes considerable time to load the > application. Mozilla(1.2.1) takes about 8 seconds, GIMP(1.2.5) takes > about 15 seconds, OpenOfficeWriter takes about 25 seconds. The system > monitor is showing that memory is using about 246MB out of 250MB and > swap is using 29MB out of 510MB. If you install the systat package you can run "iostat -x 1" and see what your hard disk utilization is like in real time. Though I imagine a drive that old might be loud enough to give you an audible indication as to whether or not the disk was thrashing. > I think that my problem is that I am a slow linux machine because I am > CPU bound? > > What is the recommended CPU speed to get decent performance? I would > like to see OpenOffice come up in less than about 5 seconds. Note that the applications you're starting are known hogs. On my P4 OOo starts up rather slowly. Check this out... FC2t1 ... 383MB RAM, 1.5GHz P4 Mozilla - 5 seconds Gimp - 6 seconds OOo writer - 12 seconds Note that my CPU is many times faster than yours, and a couple of generations newer. And yet I still have to be patient. These load times were higher still when I was running RHEL 3 clones on this box. There are some other things you really ought to do to squeak more performance out of this low-end machine. Go into /etc/rc5.d and see what daemons are set to start. Do you really need them all? You'll find a lot of cruft in there right from the getgo. Look into other Window Managers. KDE & Gnome are both rather resource hungry. Your machine probably has icewm installed or available. That wuold be a good starting point to lighten up the resource load on your machine. Also look into using a lighter weight browser, like Mozilla Firebird (or Firechicken, or whatever it's called today). OOo is never going to be fast to load on that box. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
