Why is Linux with 64Mb RAM so butt slow?
 

It sucks it's like slowmo. It's impossible to use kde/gnome for any serious work. Regardless of cpu with 600MHz,

Windoze xp runs 2x faster on same config.

? ? ?

Dude, you are like a guru, what kind of serious work can't YOU do on KDE/GNOME?

well sorry, I should have said serious usage

Use a lighter desktop environment. ;)

If you want to speed up your machine, get more RAM. -mk

I'm trying to say that 600MHz system is still decent and even with 64MB any os should work fine with normal speed. but as it seems linux has become much more resource hungry than windows

Everything you run tries to run out of ram. If they can't, the least use process is moves to swap to make room for the new process. When the process that was moved to swap needs to run, again the least used process is moved to swap. And so on and so on. The PC and Linux is a virtual memory machine. If you want to speed up a virtual memiory machine, you add more ram. Nothing personal, but that just the way it operates.

But one thought, you may be experiencing problems due to IRQ sharing. -mk

offcourse not. but KDE/GNOME use more resources. if you use a lighter window manager like blackbox it will use less memroy and will get the speed you expect

I dont think X with KDE and GNOME are a part of real Linux, in my oppinion they are a Luxury, a add on, that we all like to use. Real Linux is only the console and THAT runs faster than winblows and uses few resources.
Also as mentioned Linux loads the kernel and everything else it is using into memory for fast access so the memory gets used up real quick, but im sure you know all of this already, and yeah it kinda sucks KDE/GNOME are such memory eaters...
-NSKL

Maybe it's because I have LOADS of RAM but I see only slight differences when I use another X Client. The difference from KDE to say, Blackbox, is to me only maybe a few hundreths of a second or less. Sometimes I think some of my programs startup faster in KDE. But yes, they difinitely start a billion times faster in Console with no X running, so it does still have Winbloze beat hands down there.

I do video editing, and that is SO much faster, even in X than it was in Winbloze. It used to take me approx 8 hours to compress a 2.5 hour DVD down to a decent (around 800mb) sized DivX on Winbloze. Now on KDE, it takes me about as long as the video, maybe 4 hours at worst. That's twice as fast as Winbloze.

we all know that linux console is faster, less resource hungry than windoze, if it wouldn't who would use them anyway, but the point is that KDE/GNOME seems to put more load to system than windoze .

---MasterC: I can hardly beleive your claim about flasking mpegs. With same hardware I very much doubt that linux would give you 2x + performance boost. Progies like flaskmpeg, avi2mpg, virtualdub.. are capable of full cpu power utilization, and very much doubt that you get more cpu power with linux than windoze or mac or any other os

That's what I was thinking. But maybe it's because of the other programs I use while flasking, or vdubbing etc. Maybe it's because linux takes more from my ram than from my processor while processing the apps I am using while converting video. Those number are fairly accurate though. I recorded the season finale of Angel, and got the video onto the system in Winbloze. Then I "shrink wrapped" it with DivX from 9GB to 1GB. All in XP. It took around 4 hours for that. Then, just as an experiment, I did the same thing in Linux. It did it in REAL time, meaning it only took an hour. I know what you mean about those proggies should be giving me the same time results, but the numbers just aren't speaking the same. The resulting videos were, to me, the same quality as well. As they should be because I used the same codec for both.

I can only guess that it's like I said before, resource sharing problem in Winbloze. That is my speculation.

but isn't flask for both OSes.
btw
what utils you use in linux then?

Even with an AMD 1800xp kDE 3 sucks....

I prefer windowmaker which needs 1 sec to load ::)

Does your hard drive seem to work for a long time? I could be that your swap partition isn't large enough and between the swap and RAM you just don't have enough memory for what you are doing. On the same topic of hard drive, is DMA set correctly for your machine?