Why is Red Hat so incredibly slow on my system?

templecat · 03-27-2003, 02:25 PM

had 128mb of ram, (dual boot w 98) bumped up da ram and no performance boost... does the AMD processor not play as well with GUI??

kc8tbe · 03-27-2003, 02:41 PM

Do things run a bit faster after a reboot? Maybe you have a memory leak! Check out this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...0&goto=newpost

tbob419 · 04-03-2003, 09:59 AM

I'm running on an Athlon 1.2 CPU with 512mb RAM!! and it's still taking 2-3 minutes to load up ANYTHING, the same machine running XP is lightning fast, is this a problem in the GUI or the OS in general?

mhearn · 04-03-2003, 10:21 AM

nVidia drivers? Make sure you're using the very latest ones if you have an nVidia card, I mean very very latest, a few days ago new ones were released that solved a lot of performance problems with 2D graphics on their cards.

tbob419 · 04-03-2003, 10:27 AM

Already installed the latest nVidia drivers when I installed RH8 last week, and she's still a-runnin' slooooow

pablob · 04-03-2003, 10:34 AM

Yeah, first of all, RAM. With that CPU, try 256MB and things will speed up by 100% for sure.

Second. Harddisk tunning. Look at this:
# hdparm /dev/hda (or whatever your hd device it is)

Results:

/dev/hda:
multcount = 1 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)

Test actual performance:

# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 15.49 seconds = 4.13 MB/sec

( This is poor)

Turn on DMA support:
# hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

Test again HD performance:
# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.08 seconds = 20.78 MB/sec

THAT MEANS 500 % PERFORMANCE INCREASE !!!!!

Play with:
hdparm -d0 /dev/hda
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
hdparm -c0 /dev/hda
hdparm -c1 /dev/hda
hdparm -c2 /dev/hda

And check after each with hdparm -t /dev/hda

txtoolman · 04-03-2003, 11:11 AM

I too have a K6-2 500 CPU with 196mb ram. I already have my HD tuned.

Is there someone that can comfirm/deny if any of these issues are related to AMD processors? The system that tbob419 has sounds like it should run very well once the HD is tuned.

mhearn · 04-03-2003, 11:22 AM

What driver version are you using, exactly?

pablob · 04-04-2003, 03:26 AM

What about:

append = "idebus=XX"

inside lilo.conf ?

XX being your IDE bus speed; i.e. idebus=66

I've had 2 AMD's:
One AMD 486 80Mhz. Running Slackware.
One AMD K6-3D_2 350MHz. Running RedHat 5.1, 6.1, 6.2

Never had a problem with linux. Even running Oracle & BEA Weblogic5 on the K6 it worked at a fine rate.