Re: Etch becoming slower than Sarge?

[Douglas Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 08:47:48PM +0000, andy wrote:
> ?ukasz Andrzejak wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >On 1/4/07, *Kumar Appaiah* <akumar@ee.iitm.ac.in 
> ><mailto:akumar@ee.iitm.ac.in>> wrote:
> >
> >    A couple of my friends who were using Sarge, on machines with 128 MB
> >    of RAM and 256 MB of RAM have complained that an upgrade from Sarge to
> >    Etch has slowed their machine down considerably. This is irrespective
> >    of the Window Manager. Is there any particular reason why this could 
> >
 
> I must put my hand up: I am running the vanilla Gnome DE and there are 
> probably loads of services that I don't need and several I don't want. 
> Ordinarily I would run XFce but wanted to play in Candy Land for a while 
> with an all singing, all dancing, bells and whistles, bloated DE. Also, 
> I got lazy and fed up with configuring the XFce menus on Etch in the way 
> I used to use them on Slackware. Methinks I will need to beef up on 
> Gnome and the services it runs by default, what they do, and how to turn 
> them off or configure them. If anyone has any specific recommendations 
> that would be useful, but in the meantime I'll rummage in the on-line 
> Gnome help/info files.
> 
> As an aside, having just double checked, I am supposed to be running 1GB 
> of RAM but it is only showing a total of 758MB. Is this typical rounding 
> off and 1GB is in reality only 758MB, or is it typical for the full 
> amount not to be shown? Seems like missing 250MB of RAM is a fair chunk 
> to not show up. What gives?
> 

I run amd64 Etch on an AMD Athlon 3800+, one GB stick DDR2-800 ECC
memory (I know, to really get the dual data rate I need two sticks,
that's next year's upgrade).  Since I use SATA drives I couldn't use
Sarge so don't know if Etch is slower on this box.  My other box runs
Sarge but its a 486.  I would hazzard a guess that my amd64 is faster
than my 486 :-)

My top shows Mem: 1027728k total and under normal load including
watching a DVD is 97% idle, under 1% waiting.  I __finally__ figured out
how to get it to use swap and spend some time waiting:
	
	have aptitude upgrading (actual installation not downloading)
	run long S.M.A.R.T. self-tests on sda and sdb
		(dual SATA drives in raid1)
	run a full backup (making tar.bz2 files)
	run galeon
	watch a dvd on VLC, deinterlace-blend, expand to full-screen
		(1600 x 1200)


Then I use all of 84k swap, wait 25%, idle 94%.  Swap is encrypted.

I run icewm via startx when needed.  I don't use the gnome desktop but I
do use some gnome apps (galeon, evince, gnumeric).


I wonder if all your memory is working?  What does dmesg show?  

Doug.