Debian Slow?
I'm starting to wonder how much difference gentoo's optimization actually
makes. The labs at uni where I'm writing this from have near identical
hardware (Athlon 1400, 256 MB DDR ram, Intel PRO, etc...) to my Debian
workstaion at home, except that my desktop has a GF4 graphics versus S3
generic, and an SB Live rather than crappy onboard sound.
Given this, I'd expect the machines to be fairly similar in speed. While I
know that gentoo does optimize stuff, and it does result in performance
gains, It shouldn't make that much difference. Things like GNOME and
Nautilus start somewhere in the order of 10 to 15 times faster than on my
machine at home.
I'm guessing it has something to do with the memory usage, because the
machines here use about 15 MB of swap, with 20ish MB of memory free by the
time I'm halfway through my 1 GB swap at home! I've cleaned up the
services, and turned off things like FTP, Samba, and so on, but it hasn't
made much of a difference (according to top, they weren't using much ram
anyway).
Kernel at labs is 2.4.25 versus 2.6.3 at home. Both use ReiserFS for /.
Labs use NFS for /home, versus second ReiserFS partion at home for /home/.
Any ideas? This is driving me insane. Even the CD-Rom mounts faster!
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