Bob Hynes wrote:
I have debian running on a 500Mhz box with 256MB ram. It's pretty
slow...slower than windows would be. Is there anyone who know what I
could be doing to speed things up? turning off services, adding ram? I'm
also considering tying another version of Linux, but maybe this box is
just too slow at 500Mhz?
My guess at the main causes, very generally described:
-lack of DMA or other non-optimal disk usage due to missing or sub-optimal
chipset driver support, etc. (This occasionally happens with Windows too.)
-Swapping.
-Slow graphics hardware, possibly compounded by under-utilized or missing
acceleration support. (Against the usual philosophy of free software, some
early graphics architectures were dropped by XFree86 developers. Hopefully
this trend will be stopped or reversed in X.org.)
-RAM or CPU intensive X features enabled by default, like backing store,
anti-aliasing, high pixel depth and high screen resolution.
-RAM or CPU intensive application graphics features enabled by default, like
flash, java(script), heavy caching, double-buffering, etc.
-Missing processor-specific kernel optimization.
My usual approach is to determine and guage the relative impact of the causes
before looking for solutions. For each problem area there are diagnostic and
benchmarking utilities in Debian, but rather than writing an exhaustive list, it
might be more efficient use of time to respond to specific questions, like "how
do I tell if my box is swapping?" etc.
Once I have found the performance issues and measured the relative impact of
each, then it's time to look at solutions, which can involved changes to the
kernel, system configuration, software and/or hardware. Again it may be best
addressed in response to specific questions.
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