Question before installing - Speed issue

seib3377 · n00b Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Posts: 3

Sorry, I read through the FAQ as well as News & Announcements and I couldn't find an answer to my question, so I figured since the majority of you run Gentoo or are in the process of installing it, you could help me.

I've been using RedHat linux for little over two years now. To support the community I try to purchase a boxed set of the operating system every two full version release. Recently I upgraded to 8.0 and while I found the operating system *utterly* beautiful, I find it to be extremely slow. Rather then go back to RH 7.3, I've decided to venture off into a different distribution. Leaving RedHat will be heard, but I think its about time. The two distributions I'm considering are Debian & Gentoo. I briefly considered a Linux From Scratch, but I decided against it.

I'm curious how much faster Gentoo is compared to other operating systems, specifically RedHat & Debian. My school machine is an Intel Pentium 4 1.4Ghz with 128MBs of RAM. I typically use it for surfing the net (via Mozilla), typing papers (via OpenOffice.org) and talking to friends (via gaim).

I want a speed demon, is Gentoo the way to go?

Thanks for the information.

krusty_ar · Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 10:29 pm Post subject:

probably yes, if you are willing to give time to compile everithing :smile:

i used to have mdk8.1 (loved it) and i can notice a big performance gap
mdk was a i586 distro and rh (iirc) is a i386 distro, the gap should be greater (in theory).

for a bigger performance boost you should try prelnking (in any distro)

OTOH: gentoo is a metadistro so tou will have to do some extra work deciding what packages do you want and what USE flags you want to use.

hope that helped making your decision.

PS: gentoo forums are one of the best comunities i have seen in my life!!
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seib3377 · n00b Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Posts: 3

Thanks for the help Krusty. I have one question though - what is prelnking?

AndiW · Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2003 4:54 am Post subject:

Basically it makes your applications start faster.

Check this out:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml
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drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

Gentoo can be very fast. But installing can be pretty slow as everything is compiled from source (well, almost everything)

With your computer it shouldn't be too terribly bad though...

Normal usage will be very good (depending on the build options you choose of course...)

Prelinking will definatly speed up gentoo... Executables usually have to dynamically link to libraries when you run them, which adds to the start up time.. What prelink does is modify your executables so they don't have to do all the dynamic linking.
In other words.... It gets rid of stuff that has to be done when you run the programs which makes them start up a lot faster.

metalac · Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2003 6:15 am Post subject:

I had Mandrake on my P3 800mhz laptop and it was a drag, so i decided to test stuff and put a Gentoo on my dual p2 300mhz box. This box is dual but techincaly slower than p3 800mhz, plus it had 128mb RAM less, back then, now they're equal. At the time I installed it that older box was running Linux faster than I had Mandrake on my new laptop. After that I immidiately got Gentoo on my laptop and that was the end of my "slowness" with Linux

seib3377 · n00b Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Posts: 3

Thanks for the info on prelinking ... I'm sure I could have picked that stuff up on my own if I would have just searched for it, but I appreciate all the feedback. You guys are a big help.

Goalie_Ca · Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2003 10:22 pm Post subject:

I came from Redhat 8.0 and found it unbearably slow. Mandrake is quite a bit faster, but not near as fast as gentoo. Thanks for the prelink tip, i never heard of that b4

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