[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: a question on performance



On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 04:58:41PM -0700, Derek Gladding wrote:
| On Thursday 18 July 2002 04:39 pm, martin f krafft wrote:
| > what could be the reason that my X (4.1, Woody, ATI Radeon card with
| > VESA driver) is not as performant as it could be on a 1.2GHz PIII
| > with 1Gb of RAM?

| Hmm, no answers, but some ideas:
| 
| (1) VESA driver is painfully slow - it works, but does everything in 
| software, gobbling up huge chunks of CPU.

While that's true, VESA isn't as bad as martin is describing his
situation.

I use vesafb on a Duron 750MHz, 256MB RAM, and a SiS6326 (yes, very
cheap) video card.  For normal usage it is just fine.  I can type
stuff in vim and view pages in galeon without trouble.  I even run
xosview, xmms, esd, and other background apps continuously (not to
mention exim, apache and jabber, and sometimes zope and postresql).

Certainly if I try scolling line-by-line through a long document the
system will drag.  (instead use <PgUp>/<PgDown> in galeon for a _big_
reduction in lag time)  I can also peg the CPU if an app or script
spews lots and lots of output (either to gnome-terminal to to the
console).  Also, tuxracer is unusable and I need to pause realplayer
periodically or else the audio lags noticeably behind the video.

However, those are "extreme" conditions, wrt video.  For basic stuff
like typing an email in vim, vesafb is plenty fast enough.

Oh, yeah, I'm using XFree86 4.1 also.

-D

-- 
"Open Source Software - Sometimes you get more than you paid for..."
 
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/

Attachment: pgpgY52lCGkf1.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: