Re: Diagnosing poor performance
On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 08:42:04PM +0000, Patrick Kirk wrote:
| Hi all,
|
| My laptop has a 4MB vid card, 64 MB RAM, 120MB swap and a Pii 400
| celeron processor.
Either you have a PII or a Celeron, but not both in one chip.
| I'm running enlightenment with konqueror for file management, galeon for
| web and evolution for mail.
|
| Performance is appalling. Konqueror takes 13 seconds to launch. Galeon
| takes 10 seconds. Evolution takes 15 seconds. Even Eterm takes over 10
| seconds. Switching between apps takes forever and involves screens
| freezing.
E is not lightweight at all. I prefer sawfish. Try and it and see if
it helps at all. In addition, don't use a pixmap based theme. They
take much more CPU to handle drawing and resizing and the like.
Even on my systems (Duron 750 or PIII 600, 256MB RAM) galeon takes a
while to load. My solution is to start it when I login (on a
different workspace) and leave it. When I need it it is there. Kinda
like what emacs people do.
I don't use KDE so I can't say anything about Konqueror. I'm sure it
would help if you only used 1 desktop environment, but I don't know
how much. Give Konqueror a try for web or give Nautilus or GMC a try
for file management. (personally, though, I just like the command
line for file management)
Evolution may be in the same boat as galeon and emacs -- run it and
leave it running 'cause it takes too long to start it. I tried it a
little bit before they had a stable release.
| Is there a URL of useful diagnostics?
The only ways I know of to find out what causes performance problems
is to
o use a profiler on the app to see where its hotspots
o simply watching system load and seeing whether it is memory,
cpu, or disk that is being used
I do notice, though, that all the apps you mentioned are rather large
and heavyweight and aren't of the highest performance on any system.
The switching desktops causing the system to lock could be caused by
bad video hardware (do you have another box you can use to ping or ssh
from when it appears to lock?) or it could be a result of the window
manager not behaving very well. Try some other window managers and
see if you can reproduce the lockup. If not, then that must be the
problem. If you can, then the problem isn't the window manager
itself.
-D
--
Misfortune pursues the sinner,
but prosperity is the reward for the righteous.
Proverbs 13:21
Reply to: