Mailing List Archive

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 17:18 +0800, 韡武 张 wrote:
> I often think my thinkpad notebook is too slow. Usualy it takes more than 15
> seconds to start apache2. My colleague could finish loading a webpage using
> mozilla with about 1.5 seconds on Celeron 800MHz, meanwhile I need 10
> seconds to loading the sampe page, while I am using Celeron 800MHz too. And
> to free memory and cpu power I don't even run a desktop environment (only
> the windowmanager "enlightenment"). Besides, my mp3 player lags when I open
> new webpages, which seldom happen to my colleague. Even this slow, my memory
> is never used up.
>
> Perhaps I could benchmark the system and compare with other people. So
> what's the most frequently used benchmark when people running Gentoo compare
> proformance with each other? And perhaps with benchmark I could see what's
> the real reason for being slow?

I'd compare with you if you really wanted, but it sounds like you've
already done some comparing.

I'd check to see if DMA is enabled on your hard disk, as it can be a
huge killer to your system when you have disk access (such as loading
mp3s, or your browser caching the page you're downloading). You need
hdparm to do this.

hdparm -d /dev/hda
will tell you if it is on or not. using -d1 will enable, -d0 will
disable. If your chipset currently has support in your kernel. On a
intel 800MHz Thinkpad, it should just be generic intel stuff.

After that, I'd look at what video driver your X11 server is using. If
it is a driver that does not support any accelleration (I'm not talking
3d), then that could slow down apps that tend to draw alot (web
browsers, graphically intensive window managers ;) . I doubt this would
be the issue as it would have precisely 0 effect on your apache start
time.

--
Chris I <chris@cidesign.ca>

Chris I wrote:
>
> I'd check to see if DMA is enabled on your hard disk, as it can be a
> huge killer to your system when you have disk access (such as loading
> mp3s, or your browser caching the page you're downloading). You need
> hdparm to do this.
>
> hdparm -d /dev/hda
> will tell you if it is on or not. using -d1 will enable, -d0 will
> disable. If your chipset currently has support in your kernel. On a
> intel 800MHz Thinkpad, it should just be generic intel stuff.

I just played around with hdparm(1).
Gentoo zhangweiwu # hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 52 MB in 3.03 seconds = 17.14 MB/sec

hdparm also showed my dma is turned on, and it's in ultra dma mode 2 (I
tried to adjust to ultra mode 3, mode 4 but the -t result is the same)

is this speed 17.14MB/sec a low figure for average Celeron 800MHz level
boxes? Mine is not original thinkpad: the original Pentium III 1GMhz
motherboard get burnt and replaced with this Celeron 800MHz mother board
which is very much hotter.

> After that, I'd look at what video driver your X11 server is using. If
> it is a driver that does not support any accelleration (I'm not talking
> 3d), then that could slow down apps that tend to draw alot (web
> browsers, graphically intensive window managers ;) . I doubt this would
> be the issue as it would have precisely 0 effect on your apache start
> time.

okay, I admit I cannot tell if my X driver is okay, so I just put my
xorg.conf (generated by xorgcfg)

Section "Device"
BoardName "CyberBlade/DSTN/Ai1"
BusID "1:0:0"
Driver "trident"
Identifier "Device[0]"
VendorName "Trident"
Option "SWCursor" "off"
EndSection

Talking about graphics, I recall I never played a game smoothly. All
games lags on my box.

--
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