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Pentium 4-M Poor Performance



I have a Dell C640, Pentium 4-M 2G running Debian Sid and kernel
2.6.7-rc3.  I'm trying to figure out if the system is running slower
than it actually should.  The primary datum I have so far is that it
takes about 15 minutes to rebuild the kernel, longer than on a slower
desktop system I have.

I've built the kernel with CONFIG_MPENTIUM4=y as well as all of the
Intel Speedstep/CPU frequency scaling options on.  The proc and sys
filesystems report that the system is running at full speed (2GHz) when
AC power is connected.  x86info gives an estimate of 2.0Ghz processor
and reports Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.00Ghz.

The system only has 256M RAM, but when I'm building the kernel none of
the swap space is being used.  It also has a 4200RPM hard drive which I
suppose could be a limiting factor.  But even with these two
limitations, shouldn't a standard kernel build be faster than 15 minutes
when the same kernel on a slower Pentium 3 desktop builds in just over
10 minutes?

So I have two questions:

- How do I determine whether or not the system is running as fast as it
should?

- If it's not, what can I do to get full performance?  The laptop
doesn't really 'feel' any faster than my prior system, which was a P3
600Mhz.  I would think a P4M 2Ghz should be substantially snappier.
-- 
Adam Kessel
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org



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