KDE Crawling

English Applications
#1

My system is slower than a mule-drawn milk cart; it gets slower as more screens/applications are opened. Typical delays are:

Powering up: Restore Dolphin (65 Folders -59 files) - 4min 43 sec.
Firefox: 55 sec
Open Office: 1 min 20 sec
html file; Over 1 min - 28.8KB
KsCD: 18 sec.

<6>CPU0: Intel P4/Xeon Extended MCE MSRs (24) available
<6>CPU0: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.66GHz stepping 01
CPU MHz: 2659.973
Cache Size: 256KB
External Clock: 133 MHz
Max Speed: 1500 MHz
Current speed: 2666 MHz

I am puzzled by the log figures for maximum and current speeds.
Or am I just using a system too ancient for 11.1? :’(

#2

> My system is slower than a mule-drawn milk cart; it gets slower as more
> screens/applications are opened. Typical delays are:

your machine sound fine…it is just at your age everything seems slow…

just kidding…

> Powering up: Restore Dolphin (65 Folders -59 files) - 4min 43 sec.

does that mean from power on until you have a usable desktop with
Dolphin showing is almost five minutes??

that is insanely slow…i’m running KDE3 on openSUSE 10.3 and boot to
a usuable desktop in about 65 seconds, with a AMD Athlon™ 64
Processor 3000+ running at ~2 GHz with one meg of RAM…

hmmmm…how much RAM do you have? if you don’t have a gig you are
short…especially if you are running KDE4

> Max Speed: 1500 MHz
> Current speed: 2666 MHz
>
> I am puzzled by the log figures for maximum and current speeds.

me too…strange…

> Or am I just using a system too ancient for 11.1? :’(

mine is almost five years old…yours?

and, graphics…what have you got there…it takes a pretty stong
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and a pile of video RAM to push all
those pretty curved corners around…

if you don’t wanna add hardware, RAM, higher end graphics etc, then
you might try selecting a simpler ‘theme’…and or a lighter desktop
environment (try XFCE, for example)…

if that doesn’t get you where you want to be, you might need a leaner
distro…ask again, old man (i’m not so far behind you)…

–
palladium

#3

Turn off compositing and uninstall beagle for starters - might help. Although that does sound dreadfully slow, and I’m inclined to agree with Palladium that you might be better off with a lighter DE or distro.

I have a certain fondness for Zenwalk myself, and it’s crazy quick…

#4

Hmmm … some thoughts:

  • disable ipv6 - it slows down one’s internet connection (browsing, updates … ) incredibly. So disable it.
  • remove beagle - it indexs your drive all the time and slows the pc down incredibly. So remove it.
  • what graphic card? On openSUSE-11.1 I had a nVidia GeForce GTX260 and on an intel i7 core 920 my graphic redraw were slower than a nVidia GeForce FX5200 on a ancient 32-bit athlon-1100. Why? Because at that time the openGL nVidia driver that came with openSUSE-11.1 did not support the GTX260 very well. So I installed the proprietary nVidia graphic driver, and suddenly my Intel Core i7 flew the way it was supposed to (metamorphically). :frowning:

So there could be a few reasons for the crawl.

#5

Sadly I’d say you are at the lower limit of usability with that hardware.
How much memory does it have?

> My system is slower than a mule-drawn milk cart; it gets slower as more
> screens/applications are opened. Typical delays are:
>
> Powering up: Restore Dolphin (65 Folders -59 files) - 4min 43 sec.
> Firefox: 55 sec
> Open Office: 1 min 20 sec
> html file; Over 1 min - 28.8KB
> KsCD: 18 sec.
>
> <6>CPU0: Intel P4/Xeon Extended MCE MSRs (24) available
> <6>CPU0: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.66GHz stepping 01
> CPU MHz: 2659.973
> Cache Size: 256KB
> External Clock: 133 MHz
> Max Speed: 1500 MHz
> Current speed: 2666 MHz
>
> I am puzzled by the log figures for maximum and current speeds.
> Or am I just using a system too ancient for 11.1? :’(
>
>

#6

On my 32-bit athlon-1100 w/1GB RAM and a GeForce FX5200: Firefox: 18 sec

On my 32-bit athlon-1100 w/1GB RAM and a GeForce FX5200: OpenOffice: 16 sec

I’m puzzled too. If I read your PC specs correctly, my system is by far less powerful than yours, and my performance is 3 to 4 times faster.

But a key thing, as GofBorg alluded to, is memory. How much memory do you have on that PC ? If you have only 256MB of RAM, that could explain why your PC is slow slow.

#7

You guys are so quick on the uptake that I think that I will just rely on telepathy in the future!

Age is 71 years younger than am I!

I am surprised to find 10.3 still in use. I had it and it worked like a charm; I thought that one must update as 10.3 would not be supported.

I shall try the various removals suggested.

I cannot find any RAM entry . Is cache the same - 256 KB?

Incidentally, 11.1 won’t even load on my other somewhat ancient Compaq desktop PC. Trying to load it screwed the whole thing and I no longer have a working set of 10.3. Had to load Ubuntu.

Thanks for all the feedback. :slight_smile:

#8

> Age is 71 years younger than am I!

i understand THAT!

> I am surprised to find 10.3 still in use. I had it and it worked like a
> charm; I thought that one must update as 10.3 would not be supported.

right, it does work like a charm…i tried 11.0 and it didn’t work
for me…

you are right 10.3 ages out of support at the this week…i’m not
afraid (from a security standpoint) of running it connected to the net
24x7 for as long as it takes for me to make up my mind what i want to
do next…and, then do it (i’m leaning toward Windows Vista…just
joking…leaning toward SLED, Debian, CentOS, BSD…but, plan to give
11.2 a shot at it…

i’ll buy and install a new hard drive, remove the old drive, and see
how it goes…if it does not, i’ll do something different…

> I cannot find any RAM entry . Is cache the same - 256 KB?

no, cache probably refers to the CPU cache…

to learn your main memory RAM, in a terminal type

free

and, hit enter…the result gives many numbers, the one we are
interested in will be at the intersection of Mem: and total…mine
(below) shows i have 1,035,716 megs of main memory RAM (aka: 1 GB)


total       used       free     shared    buffers
Mem:       1035716    1021736      13980          0      90256

you may be interested in the official hardware requirements for
openSUSE, here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Sysreqs

–
palladium - a 1946 model earthling

#9

You are doing well then.

My 83-year old mother uses Linux on her PC, but in her case I maintain/support her PC remotely using ssh/vnc (I live a continent away from her - she lives in North America, I live in Europe). Good on you for maintaining your own Linux PC.

My mother’s PC is also old, … an Intel 900MHz with 512 MB RAM and Intel graphics. I currently have openSUSE-11.1 with KDE-3.5.10 running on it. I still have a bit more than a year to decide if / when I should update it to KDE4 (January 2011 will be the next time I have physical access to her PC - she will be (almost) 85 then).

#10

> I am surprised to find 10.3 still in use.

Hah! I have a 9.x box still running. :slight_smile:
Depends on what you need it to do really.

> I cannot find any RAM entry . Is cache the same - 256 KB?

If you open a shell(konsole or terminal) and run ‘top’ You will see an entry
for ‘Mem’. Next to it is your available total memory in kbytes. So if you
have something like 2049404k that’d be 2 Gigabytes. If you only have 6
digits in the number then you’re in the Megabyte range. You can also see how
busy your system is.

Use Control C to break out of top.

#11

This particular PC has crawled in for repair. I am awaiting the outcome. :shame: The delay has been while I found a refurbee and set it up. It would not load 11.1 and I had to go back to 10.1. That suffered from an unaccountably scratched CDROM #2; spent an entire day polishing with Brasso until it loaded. Polish, wait 10 minutes while integrity verified, polish wait ten minutes…etc, etc. Finally installed on this by excluding Digikam which I could not poish back to life. The saga continues…

#12

You’ve made my day: 5 minutes of laughter. Thank you for your Brasso story. I love it when the less evident solutions are being used.