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Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?



On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 12:14:23AM -0800, Thomas Zimmerman wrote:
> > Yes, this is the sort of anecdotal 'evidence' that is of no use
> > whatsoever. Most of the time it turns out to be a matter of local
> > system configuration. IDE DMA is one of the bigger culprits here.
> 
> Is it really? I tweeked debain on this box untill it hurt. I was slowly
> replaceing everything by hand to compile it with decent optimizations.
> As a user, forcing build changes is hard even with apt-get source (and
> apt-src). Beleive me, this is much more then turning on IDE DMA.

Turning on IDE DMA is a performance improvement of around a factor of
6-10 (2-3Mb/sec -> 25-40Mb/sec), for disk-bound operations. You can
get *more* than a 6-times improvement in performance?

> Under
> debian's X/glibc/kde I can't move windows with contents without
> 'tearing.'

Something is seriously wrong, most likely with your display
driver. You should be able to achieve this on a 486, albeit at a lower
resolution.

> X is CPU bound if you can't
> move windows smoothly because it has latency that is too high.

Moving windows around is a memory-to-framebuffer-throughput-bound
operation, not a CPU-bound one (unless your processor is really slow
and your resolution is absurdly high).

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing,
 `. `'                          | Imperial College,
   `-             -><-          | London, UK

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