On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:54:08PM EST, Javier Vasquez wrote: > Hi, > > Sorry to ask specially through this list... > > I've been a linux user for around 10 years now, however lately some > 800MHz Coppermine machines are not performing as well as they used to.
650 MHz Coppermine + 386M RAM. How much RAM do you have installed? > What I've read in this same list in the past, is that for the purpose > of still not letting them die, using openBSD, or perhaps freeBSD, is > the way to go. Or maybe turn them into servers, and optionally install one of the BSDs? > However I was looking for benchmarks, or some data that would support > that idea. The only benchmarks based on data I found, are pretty old, > and pretty much based on networking/servers, such as: > > http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability > I don't use a desktop manager, but still use X with window manager > (fluxbox has been my choice for all these years). At first glance, the above benchmark attempts to compare the performance of the respective kernels, apparently focusing on aspects that would affect the throughput of an Internet server. If that's what you have in mind, I'm not sure to what degree switching to one of the BSDs would have any relevance to the performance of an interactive user-oriented local system and make any difference to the user's perception of the responsiveness of a full-fledged 'modern' desktop running the usual CPU hogs. Taking an artificial example to illustrate, if for instance you are running an instance of Firefox with a few tabs open, and something like 90-95% of the total CPU time is spent executing JS and a few instances of the flash plugin under the covers, slightly optimizing the 5-10 remaining percent is not going to make much difference. Even if you switched to a kernel that's globally twice as 'fast' (!) so-to-speak, you would only see a performance improvement of 5% at most, which is hardly noticeable. > If any one could share pointers to more up to date benchmarks, which > are as well oriented not just to networking and servers, it'd be > great. The idea is to find data supporting the initial idea of > freeBSD or openBSD providing better performance for old machines... > Well, that might be a wrong assumption to start with, but that's what > I've read... I have a ubuntu 9.10 partition on the side that features the default gnome desktop and it takes less than a minute to go from power-up to a working desktop. If I start text-mode applications on top of xterm + gnu/screen, the system is quite responsive. If, on the other hand, I run FF or Seamonkey, things tend to be a little sluggish, but all in all it is still quite usable. If anything, recent versions of both debian and ubuntu and large GUI apps such as FF are faster to start and have an altogether crisper feel to them than their counterparts of 2-3 years ago. Since my CPU is about 25% slower, and since you use the word 'lately' to qualify the slowdown, what I'm thinking is that something else may be hogging your CPU, or you have a memory leak somewhere that eventually causes your system to spend most of its time paging. Does performance degrade over time? If you implement one of the slimmer desktops and turn off unnecessary bells and whistles in your applications, I can't see any good reason why a recent version of debian/linux could not provide a decent interactive experience on your hardware. CJ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
