5.9 Is A Little Bit Sluggish

[Triarius Fidelis]

1) Does anyone know if it is likely that 5.9 will run slower on my Omnibook?

I can't speak for every situation but I have noticed no significant difference between 5.8 and 5.9 in resource usage and speed with a roughly equivalent choice of programs.

2) Will I be able to still get my wonderful but perhaps weird programs (particularly lyx) off of gslapt?

Remember about the package requests subforum. Fortunately, Dweeberkitty has already built tetex.

[gacl]

lagagnon: I mounted the partition with the terminal. I didn't get it the first time because "mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3" gave me a permission error, while "mount /dev/hda3" worked. I guess it's the way fstab works. Thanks.

Gus

[lagagnon]

Honestly, I haven't noted much difference between 5.8 and 5.9 except that 5.9 does use a bit more RAM, especially if you use HAL. The new xfce4 and the mount applet also consume a bit more RAM, so I get RAM used (excluding cache) of 59MB with 5.8 and about 86MB with 5.9 using HAL - it should not really be that noticeable. I have not done much work seeing if loading of Seamonkey is faster or slower so I won't comment there.

[Triarius Fidelis]

Honestly, I haven't noted much difference between 5.8 and 5.9 except that 5.9 does use a bit more RAM, especially if you use HAL. The new xfce4 and the mount applet also consume a bit more RAM, so I get RAM used (excluding cache) of 59MB with 5.8 and about 86MB with 5.9 using HAL - it should not really be that noticeable. I have not done much work seeing if loading of Seamonkey is faster or slower so I won't comment there.

Seamonkey has always been bloated. Some people have indicated that the new Xorg + certain video drivers == massive bloat. On the IRC channel, The Headacher said that his ATI driver, or X in concert with the ATI driver gave him some problems with memory usage.

[sledgehammer]

Well, for what its worth, I loaded 5.9 on the HP NC6000.  I did not touch /hda3 in the load process and when I added it all my files were there.  Perhaps there is a way to upgrade to 5.9.  I don't know.  I only know that installing 5.9 over 5.8 on my home directory left my data on hda3 intact. That is great.  I might add, again for what its worth, that once I added hda3 with my old files on it, I lost the pretty 5.9 screen in favor of the xfce screen.  But if I remove hda3, I get the pretty screen back. Some Sherlock Holmes stuff here indicates that I am probably forcing 5.9 to inherit some of my 5.8 problems.  So I adjusted SimpleBackup to just backup particular directories, rather than my home, and I suspect, when next Monday comes around and SimpleBackup makes its complete backup of the Omnibook (and I then replace the data files on the NC6000 with those files), this problem will disappear too.  I hope so. I still don't have SimpleBackup working right, and think there may be some problems with it. 

I will play with 5.9 a while longer before putting it on the Omnibook, but am impressed initially and believe I will load it on the Omnibook in a week or so.  I will then report back on whether it seems sluggish.  It is certainly not sluggish on the Nc6000.

John

[sledgehammer]

I played with 5.9 on the NC6000 for a few days, and decided not to put it on the Omnibook for another year or so.  I couldn't get lyx to load properly nor could I even find gparted.  And I had firewall troubles for the first time in my life. No doubt, with time, I could figure this stuff out, but the why of it all escapes me. I guess I am just too familiar and too happy with 5.8.  I plan to wait until there is something I need to do which I can' t do with 5.8 before switching to 5.9. 

Nonetheless, for purposes of this thread, I should say that 5.9 did not seem at all sluggish on the NC6000.

John

[markus]

I am at a bit of a loss here as I have installed 5.9 on 3 different machines and it has rendered them useless.  All 3 machines worked great with 5.8.  Everything works but is painfully slow.  The first machine was a P3 - 866, 384M, after upgrading to 5.9 I sent it to the recyclers.  The second machine is a P4 1.7, 512M which I am tolerating.  My main home WS is a Compaq Evo P4 2.0, 384M this machine was a rocket with 5.8, now with 5.9 (RC3 then later STD Gold) it is painful.  as an example, right now I have firefox open and a terminal window if I click on the terminal window to switch to that task the machine sits there with the CPU pinned for 3 full seconds.  I suspect that the problem is video driver related as all 3 machines have the stupid intel onboard video.  I will bring a different vid card home from the shop and try it.  does anyone have any card suggestions?

[markus]

I should add that all the speed problems appear to be video related.  The little clock on the mouse pointer runs the CPU to %75, any animated GIF's pin the CPU, the flash plugins (flash video is unwatchable) scrolling text in a terminal screen pin's the CPU, any dialogue box and especially ones that list files, if there are just a handful of files it will pause for 2-3 seconds large dirs like /usr/X11/bin take 30-40 seconds and once the list is loaded moving the scroll bar takes about 10 seconds.  Hope this extra info triggers something for someone, I hate the idea of going back to an older version.  I have been a VL fan for years now and have used it for a number of end user situations.

[uelsk8s]

markus,
can you tell us what video driver is being used in xorg.conf?
also the output of this "ls /var/log/packages|grep intel"

[markus]

The driver is intel, here are the lines from xorg.conf

Driver      "intel"
VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
BoardName   "82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device"

I have already checked www.x.org and www.intel.com (no drivers for xorg at all)

To give a bit of my background, I administer approx 50 linux servers at small and medium sized corps.  I have a personal interest in linux on the desktop.  The servers I build are all based on a stripped install of FC then source build all apps I need.  On the desktop I have tried many but strongly favor VL.  Desktop machines I try to setup entirely from the distro and package manager because ultimately they get turned over to an end user who won't be able to upgrade anything from source.  My company also has a division that does retail sales and repairs (emphasis on repairs) this gives me a huge source of scrap machines.  I try to recycle as much as I can by installing VL and retailing machines for $69 (one hour labour) complete with recovered monitor keyboard and mouse.  When you spend time in retail you learn that there are ppl which $1000 means nothing to and ppl that have to make payments on a $69 system.  I have been considering offering my help to the group as a tester for some time now and maybe this is the time!

[GrannyGeek]

Have you tried it with the vesa driver?
--GrannyGeek

[uelsk8s]

markus, definately give the vesa and i810 drivers a try.

[markus]

The results are in.  vesa driver significantly better, I can switch tasks, move the cursor in vi etc.  the acid test, flash video on youtube, CPU bouncing between about 98 and 100 % but actually getting playback in frames per second instead of seconds per frame.  intel driver about 2 seconds per frame and i810 about 1 second per frame with CPU pinned.

running VL5.8 this machine would run about %25 cpu load showing all available FPS

I will try an vid card with the same chipset to rule out machine specific problems (I did pull it from the recycling)  then try an Nvidia and maybe an ATI card.  I realize that if this is a driver issue it really should be on the x.org group but solving problems never hurts!

[markus]

I forgot to mention that I got similar results using xubuntu (ubuntu's weak effort at making a competitor to VL) which has the same xorg and xfce

[markus]

Oops, changing video drivers broke mplayer, i get Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device

If someone knows the answer off the top of their head great.  I will try the mplayer list but I'm sure that if I just use gslapt to remove and reinstall it it will be fine