[plug] Snappy UI

[William Kenworthy]

ok, for such a beast stay away from 2.6 kernels (~1/3 slower unless you
are using something like mm patchset, which still doesnt get all the
losses over 2.4 back.)  2.6 is smoother and more responsive under load,
but at the expense of raw throughput.

Is X running properly? - some gentooists have been changing the nice
value of the X server to get responsiveness.  Also on older systems,
running it in low colour/low res modes was faster in 2D.  Many modern
graphics cards are optimised for 3D and neglect 2D (so I have been told)

Check your ide stuff with hdparm (settings like DMA) - a laptop drive is
a bit of a disaster speed wise so this is the most likely cause!

You may be able to build selected packages with more optimisation
(glibc, X and gui stuff) - ~10% may be had there if the right choices
are made (or more lost if not).  Swap debian for gentoo to wring every
last bit from the hardware (Im hoping the zealots dont notice me trying
to entice you to the dark side).

Do you have enough free disk space (at least 15%), and swap available?

Overall, a celery 1.2 with 512M shouldnt be all that bad - perhaps you
need to supply some benchmarks (hdparm -Tt /dev/hdx, glxgears (native
size and minimised) so we have an idea if there is a major problem
somewhere?  My personnel experience with a celery is that it is OK for
basic desktop stuff, but useless at anything heavy/ram intensive - this
was an 850Mhz LapTop with 128M ram

BillK
 

On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 16:07, Onno Benschop wrote:
> I know, the subject isn't very informative, but I couldn't think of
> anything else.
> 

> 
> The interface doesn't feel crisp, it feels like molasses, not something
> you could actually time, but just the feel. OO.o takes six years to load
> and I'm just not a happy camper.
...
> So, any constructive ideas that won't require me to recompile or
> reformat my disk would be well received.
> 
> I've considered booting off a Knoppix CD and I'll tell you this: that
> boots faster than my machine does from the drive.