Pardus running slow

[Linux_noob616]

I've been using Pardus for about 2 months now after switching from Kubuntu 8.04 (that beats KDE till it's dead and beats it more..)

And i saw a HUGE improvement in speed. But recently i had to go back to Windows and i noticed a enormous speed improvement.

FireFox loads pages faster and smoother, Scrolling isn't chunky.

3D Apps run much smoother.

Programs open a lot faster.

Is this normal? I hear that Linux is suppose to be worlds faster then Windows, But every distribution seems to be slower.. And i use Vista so thats saying a lot.. (other then Ubuntu, but it breaks a lot)

So if anyone could help explain why this is it would be great. thanks.

[Mhmrcs]

> When you close a tab in a browser, you don't eliminate its variables in RAM, you leave remnents, these gather up and make your browser work very slowly over time.
> Virii slow down your computer
> Linux is constant, you may have a program not respond in Linux, but it rarely makes the system not respond, you end the task very easily and move you.
> You'd pay hundreds of dollars for Windows and its RAM-empowered computer for a few miliseconds of speed?
> 3D apps run smoother because the drivers were intended for Windows

If you're not happy with the process management of Linux, there are many other features that excel where Windows cannot.

[Michiel]

It's difficult to adress slowness of in this case Pardus Linux to one cause.

Some general notes:
Firefox (and OpenOffice) are applications knwon for being rather slow in comparison to other applications (but I use tehm both, both on Linux and WinXP).

The flash plugin for linux has not be as good and fast as the one for windows so far, but that may have changed with the new release last week that was done simultaneously for Win/Mac/Linux

Other FF plugins can enhance or slow down it's speed, play with them on/off.

Playing around with the settings in Firefox can make big differences.

Systemwide the size (relative) of the swap partition can play a role in system eprformance

and so on and so on.....

just some suggestions to evaluate and see what happens to your system...

[Linux_noob616]

Swap is 6GB twice the size as the amount of RAM i have, And i am using default FireFox that came with Pardus. I'll remove flash and update it to the new version to see if i get better performance.

And to Mhmrcs, I bought this computer before i first used Linux, So i spent hundreds on my new PC that happened to come with Vista. Not cause i wanted Vista.

[Michiel]

And (I forgot) is your videocard properly installed? Using Display Manager?
(since you noticed 3D problems and slow scrolling)

[Mhmrcs]

The specifications on the computer would have been sizable to allow Vista to operate, i.e. a 2 GiB Vista computer has as much available RAM as a 1 GiB linux computer, the hardware you bought accomodated Vista to a degree.

[Mr_Shameless]

Hi,

I confirm this. My laptop is a Core2 Duo T5500, intel 950GMA with 2G of RAM.

On Pardus, firefox is noticeably slower than on other distros. Firefox lags a lot on certain pages like facebook and blogspot. This is weird.

[Mhmrcs]

Firefox works slowly for me whatever I'm using lol... They'll improve scripting in the next iteration however, which is something to look forward to but til then consider with NoScript and AdBlock installed, it will allow you to choose what you download, and load pages much faster.

Also, keep in mind that Firefox uses the Gecko engine which is more advanced but bulkier than the webkit Chrome, Epiphany and Safari use.

[tuxedup]

is cpufreq enabled?

Sometimes for whatever reason pardus cannot detect if your cpu supports cpufreq or what speeds it supports.  It might simply be stuck on powersave or ondemand mode.

[Gullible Jones]

I can think of a number of causes...

1. gtk-qt-engine. It's nice, but it's also slow. I would recommend using a different GTK engine.

2. Dynamic CPU frequency adjustment. On some chips, the p4_clockmod module has to be used, and to put things bluntly, p4_clockmod sucks - it slows down your PC and doesn't give you much in the way of power savings. If your CPU needs p4_clockmod, I would disable frequency scaling altogether.

3. Firefox using Pango, which makes it slow. To remedy this, put

Code:

export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

in your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

4. EXA. The new EXA hardware acceleration method doesn't use the best defaults on all architectures. If, for instance, you have Intel 9xx graphics hardware, you should put

Code:

Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

In the "Device" section of your xorg.conf. This will speed up scrolling significantly on affected systems.

5. Swappiness. Default for the kernel is 60 (range is from 0 to 100). If you have a lot of RAM, this means it may be being underutilized. To set it to a lower value, put

Code:

vm.swappiness = X

in /etc/sysctl.conf, where X is some number like 5.

6. Firefox... being Firefox. The sad truth of the matter is that Firefox on Linux is slower than on Windows, probably because most development is focused on Windows. Also, I should mention that slow scrolling on GMail and Facebook is a known bug in Firefox 3 on Linux - if you use Firefox 2 (some distros still use it, e.g. PCLinuxOS) you'll notice a decided lack of sluggish scrolling.

If you're not averse to using a proprietary browser, you could try Opera; it is *much* more responsive than Firefox, and uses KDE's native graphics toolkit to boot. If you want to stick with FOSS, Kazehakase might be worth a look - it is quite ugly, but it gets the job done. Unfortunately it's not in the repositories.

(There's also Arora - it is in the repositories, but can't use Java or Flashplugin as of now, although it's blazingly fast. And, last but not least, there's Konqueror - the KDE file manager is also a web browser, and a pretty nice one too. Unfortunately, Flash is unstable on it, and some pages, e.g. Facebook, aren't handled entirely right.)

7. Likewise for Flash. Flashplugin for Linux is kind of crap. Unfortunately, much of the internet's content is now in Flash, due to what stupidity I know not.

That's all I really know of - there are other tweaks, but Pardus, being a good distro, already employs them.

[PhiX]

Swap is 6GB twice the size as the amount of RAM i have, And i am using default FireFox that came with Pardus. I'll remove flash and update it to the new version to see if i get better performance.

With your 3Gb of RAM, you don't even need a swap partiton at all. My desktop computer has 2 Gb of RAM and runs fine with no swap partition at all !
A swap partiton shouldn't exceed a size of 2 Gb, unless you have special needs. It is useless to increase swap in order to speed up your system, as the access time of a hard drive is very much slower than that of RAM.

[Lisa]

That's good to know, as I've heard the same thing and I don't know where the information comes from, if it is an easy ratio that someone has taken out of a hat, so to speak, or if it is outdated information for slower computers "your swap should be twice the size of your ram, blah blah".   I have 4 GB of RAM and made a partition of 8 GB when I first installed Pardus.  I'll have to try it without the swap partition. 

Lisa

[PhiX]

It is an old rule that is still relevant for old computers, but is totally outdated with most of the computers sold today. As for your computer with 4 Gb of RAm (wow !), you can spare the 8 Gb for something useful, like data storage.

[Gullible Jones]

There is one thing a swap partition is still useful for... Hibernation.

[PhiX]

It's not useful for me, but it's certainly worth mentionning for the laptop users out there. Thanks !