Performance tuning?
I've recently installed woody on an older system: 6x86 P150, 112MB RAM,
Matrox Millennium I 4MB PCI, Buslogic multimaster PCI scsi (all scsi, no
ide). This system is far from modern but I really remember it feeling a
lot faster when it was my primary workstation (running win95.)
I've installed XFree 4.1 and Gnome 1.2. I'm new to the the recent
graphical desktop developments (the last linux that I used was in the
4.x redhat days) but it seems like everything takes forever. Clicking a
tab in the Gnome preferences widget or mozilla preferences results in a
1 or 2 second delay before anything changes on the screen. Repainting
the default desktop wallpaper seems to go pixel-by-pixel at times.
Mozilla (0.9.9) averages about 5 to 10 seconds to render modest pages
(like the debian.org home page.) This is not a function of bandwidth as
I get 180 KB/s downloading packages. As an extreme example, hitting
reload on the default freshmeat homepage takes mozilla ~26 seconds (more
like 30+ seconds when not cached), compared to ~3 seconds for mozilla
under W2k on my main workstation which uses the same internet
connection. Now certainly, that machine is more modern but it's just an
800 MHz athlon. I can live with the fact that rendering large pages is
cpu-bound, but back in the day this video card had very respectable 2D
performance and I'm certainly not seeing any of that currently. My
preferred desktop is 1152x864x24 but I'm currently at 1024x768x16 to see
if it's any faster, and it's not.
So my question is, what should I be looking at? Xfree is using its
accelerated mga driver (I think), but how do I check to make sure it's
fully tweaked? Is there anything I should check as far as bus/cpu/ram
bottlenecks? I'm running 2.4.16 which I compiled for this machine.
I'll doublecheck the BIOS chipset timings (i430HX) but I don't think
they've changed in a long time. Disk is not a problem because the
swapfile is hardly being used and the scsi subsystem is respectable.
Any advice?
Thanks,
Brian
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