[TriLUG] My slow linux machine

[Jason Tower]

welcome to trilug james!  glad to have you aboard, please keep your 
hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.

as for your situation, the one thing that no one has mentioned is a 
newer hard drive.  with its higher rotational speed and much higher 
data density, a recent 7200 rpm drive will make a noticeable difference 
in system performance, particularly when starting apps.  some older 
mobos choke on disks larger than 32gb though, so proceed carefully.

if you still want/need something a bit faster, i'd be happy to set you 
up with a 400 or 500MHz P2/P3 box on the cheap, especially if you want 
to trade in your 233 </shameless plug>

jason

On Saturday 14 February 2004 13:52, James McDermott wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is my 1st ever post and I am a newbe.
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> I do see where my CPU utilization goes to 100% while an application
> is being started or while it is shutting down.
>
> After Mozilla, OpenOffice writer, GIMP etc. are open, the response
> times are not fast, but if you have some patience, the response times
> are marginally acceptable. I can have many applications open and not
> exceed my available RAM or use any significant SWAP.
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks, Jim McDermott