Gnome aaaaaaawfully slow on a Pentium 133 w. 192 MB RAM

VinzC

Hi.

I've finally tested my old pentium 133 under Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.4.25. It took approximately 40 hours to compile Gnome (?). Now Gnome is painfully slow.

I don't want to blame it on Gnome since I was a brand Linux newbie not so long ago. I've also seen another thread (https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=191974&highlight=slow) where someone says it's Ok with the same kind of machine but but no more than 56 MB of RAM

. There is no indication on what Desktop Manager he uses however.

So I must have made something wrong... But what?

My graphics card is an S3 ViRGE with 2 MB RAM. Yes I know it's not much but is there a way to make the most of it? Actually Gnome is about 10 times slower than Windows NT Workstation on the same machine... Sorry but that's my only reference ;-)

.

Is it all about compile options? I've used O3 for optimization level. I've also selected pentium as both -march and -mcpu compile flags together with -fomit-frame-pointer.

Is it about the video driver in X? I've selected video driver n° 450 - S3 ViRGE (generic) when I ran xf86config. My X configuration worked quite well the first time. But I did only run X. I hadn't compiled any other DM yet.

Thanks in advance for any hint or suggestion.
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Titeuf · Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 7:01 pm Post subject:

gnome and kde are both heavy desktop environments.
Try using something lighter like fluxbox

madtinkerer · Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 7:27 pm Post subject:

Gnome and KDE are much more comprehensive DE's than windows NT, hence the slower performance. As suggested, Try a window manager like fluxfox or openbox, or maybe xfce4. Don't expect much from that system, but with one of those options it should be useable.

VinzC · Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 7:56 pm Post subject:

Thanks, I'll give Fluxbox a try.
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neysx · Retired Dev Joined: 27 Jan 2003 Posts: 795

xfce4 should be a lot more usable on such a low spec box.

BTW, using -O3 increases your compile time a lot and makes executable often slower than -O2
-O2 is used by default by Gentoo, use -O3 when you know it will result in a better executable.
On old machines like yours with a small CPU cache, it's sometimes said -Os (optimize for size) will result in better performances (better hit ratio on the cache and less I/O). That will be up to you to test.
You should also add -pipe. It has no influence on compiled result but should speed up compiles a bit.

FYI, I have Gentoo running on a P100 ;-)

but no X there (current uptime is 415 days). I recently upgraded glibc+gcc: 24 hours of compile time!

Hth

::edit::
I noticed your post about trying fluxbox after posting mine.
Fluxbox is also very nice.
I would not want to sound like «xfce4 rocks/fluxbox sucks».

VinzC · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 5:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks, neysx. I'll also give xfce a try.

Nice to have an opinion from a developer as I am one but on the Win* platform. I'd like to progressively leave Windows and develop under Linux as everything on that [... insert your comment here ... ;-)

] former platform is tending to .NET nowadays. And I just disagree. With the politics only.

So I'm searching for a new home. After I have a good practice on Linux I think I'm going to make the big step. I'm fond of C++. I bet it won't be a big deal... I'm noting down what you've said as it's always worth remembering.

BTW I used distcc to compile on a different machine that is much faster; it's an Athlon XP 1.5 GHz. However I'm surprised it took that long, just as if it were compiled locally when I compare with your own figures. I disabled local compilation also using only the remote machine (distcc hosts include only the remote host, not localhost).

I can say it's still much faster than the local way. Do you think it can be even faster? I didn't change distcc options on the remote machine in fact. I found the slower machine spends most of its time doing stuff that are even not related to compiling (probably linking?).

Any idea?
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Gentoo addict: tomorrow I quit, I promise!... Just one more emerge...
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Malakin · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 6:27 pm Post subject:

You might find this article interesting:
http://www.csh.rit.edu/slashdot/distcc.html

neysx · Retired Dev Joined: 27 Jan 2003 Posts: 795