Re: Debian on Slow laptops. What setup is best?
Benedek Frank wrote:
>On Tuesday 21 June 2005 19:44, you wrote:
>
>
>>Hrm... You should have seen a speed *increase*, if anything. The first
>>thing that I wonder about is if you have a stock kernel or if you
>>compiled it yourself? I'm thinking that you may want to compile it
>>optimized to your CPU. (But if you have, well, nevermind.) I have a
>>PII 400 CPU, and I noticed a definite improvement in the 2.4 - 2.6
>>upgrade.
>>
>>Next, try using "top" to see what all is running. Use the "M" command
>>to sort by memory usage, and see what processes are eating up memory.
>>(Look under the "RES" column to see what the actual memory usage is.)
>>You may find that there are some packages that you want to disable or
>>remove because of the fact that they are running in the background (like
>>you've already done with KDE.)
>>
>>
>
>Hi. Can you check to see if I use something really that I shouldnt use at all?
>
>THanks, and the RES column is that shows the "m" after numbers. Maybe stands
>for for MB?
>
>22318 root 15 0 43904 32m 5732 S 3.6 13.9 23:48.20 X
> 3814 ben 16 0 48816 31m 21m S 0.0 13.3 2:15.27 kmail
> 4052 ben 16 0 81496 22m 17m R 0.0 9.5 0:17.64 kopete
> 2152 ben 15 0 27776 15m 11m S 0.0 6.5 0:20.47 kmix
>30692 ben 15 0 32636 14m 12m S 0.0 6.3 0:22.40 knotify
> 4037 ben 15 0 30020 12m 7832 S 24.8 5.3 0:32.65 gnome-terminal
>22347 ben 15 0 17792 12m 7272 S 0.0 5.3 1:13.85 xfce-mcs-manage
>30686 ben 16 0 26556 11m 9.8m S 0.0 5.0 0:08.34 kded
> 3850 ben 16 0 25080 10m 8700 S 0.0 4.3 0:00.20 kio_file
> 4140 ben 15 0 49728 10m 8696 S 0.0 4.3 0:00.39 kio_pop3
> 4142 ben 15 0 49728 10m 8696 S 0.0 4.3 0:00.29 kio_pop3
>22338 ben 15 0 15556 9m 6716 S 0.0 4.2 1:32.69 xfce4-panel
>30684 ben 16 0 24764 9996 8548 S 0.0 4.2 0:02.08 klauncher
>30679 ben 17 0 23464 9588 8004 S 0.0 4.0 0:02.13 kdeinit
>24336 ben 15 0 24424 8972 5740 S 3.0 3.7 8:43.92 gkrellm
>30682 ben 16 0 22788 8792 7716 S 0.0 3.7 0:01.60
>
>
>
>>The third thing I would recommend is to increase your memory if at all
>>possible. It won't help directly with boot time, but it will help keep
>>stuff from swapping out to disk, which will make things faster while you
>>are using your machine.
>>
>>
>>
>Cannot do that unfortunately. I have 256, which is max.
>
>
>
>>Last up is a faster HDD -- will help when stuff is swapped out. When I
>>upgraded my HDD I got a noticable speed increase when stuff was swapped
>>out.
>>
>>
>>
>What I did to decrease the systems swapping tendency is I changed this
>
>"cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
>to check swappiness. This shows 60 by default. If reduced, the system will use
>RAM more and SWAP less. RAM is faster than SWAP. We set it to 10.
>
>sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10
>
>To keep this after reboot, we edit /etc/sysctl.conf and put
>
>vm.swappiness=10"
>
>
>
>>FWIW, I have a 400 Mhz PII laptop, with 352 megs of memory and a fast
>>HDD. I run WindowMaker, Evolution, Firefox, and Eclipse at the same
>>time and have a reasonably responsive system.
>>
>>HTH,
>>Ian
>>
>>
>>
>I am hoping to get a good responsive system as well. I hope some speedups may
>allow that.
>
>
>>On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 18:13 +0200, Benedek Frank wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi
>>>
>>>I am seeking info from other people who has slow laptops, or just know
>>>how to save memory and CPU usage on a Debian system.
>>>
>>>I am an owner of a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VRX/K laptop, that has a Transmeta
>>>Crusoe 600MHZ CPU, which is very slow in nowdays, but I refuse to change
>>>it as I love it. I have a Centrino DELL laptop, but I dont use that much,
>>>as I am just inlove with this thing, however I need it to be faster.
>>>
>>>I have a 2.6.11 kernel. I saw a major slowdown from when I upgraded to
>>>2.6 kernel, from 2.4. Even disabling Discover, I now only have Hotplug,
>>>but boot time is still around 3 minutes. That is to console. From there,
>>>I booted KDM and KDE, and my full boot time was around 4 minutes and a
>>>little.
>>>
>>>I looked into smaller window managers, but finally I am using now XFCE,
>>>which is ultra fast compare to KDE. I dont use KDM now anymore, I rather
>>>log in with console and do a "startx" from there.
>>>
>>>However, still my boot time is unacceptable. Not even speaking when I try
>>>to open Kmail or Openoffice, and Firefox. They take a loooooooong time to
>>>boot up.
>>>
>>>Anybody has any more suggestions, how to make a speedy but usable Debian
>>>laptop?
>>>
>>>Thanks
>>>
>>>Bence
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
>
I had a swag of trouble on this Acer 1355LC lappy trying to use KDE.
Love it, but it just doesn't work when connected to the net. There were
no memory or CPU drains, the system just moved like a slug. I googled
and also sent round from some LUG's and no one had a real answer. This
was happening only when I was connected through "pon"
There is only 256 MB with 64 MB memory shared with the video card. It
runs very nicely, but with Icewm, Moz- thunderbird and Moz-firefox and
Xterm and TKdesk.
If you want to see your memory, cpu, etc.., usage install gkrellm and it
is there all the time as you work. Top for anything when you see things
starting to whiptail or something like that.
Hope that helps
Reply to: