Arch Linux

pecan

Member

Registered: 2007-04-06

Posts: 93

Slax performance

I've been reading about slax and I was wondering if it would actually boot faster because your running it from a USB stick then a distro like Arch from hard drive. The other thing is that you also have the option of storing the entire OS into RAM, if a computer actually had 4GB of RAM wouldn't that make the system very responsive? I know it uses some form of compression which would probably effect performance, but does anyone have any experience with slax under these kinds of conditions.

sl

Banned

From: uk

Registered: 2007-04-04

Posts: 42

Website

Re: Slax performance

in my experience, i've run slax from cd and usb .. i didn't notice much speed up over the cd from usb ...
boot speed is among the fastest fro live cds .. prolly 30-40 seconds .. I've never used it on a machine with more than 256mb ram ... even so, the performance is not much worse than ubuntu ... nowhere near arch on a hard drive .. but still very usable ...

a more optimized live system . performs better, and with your 4gb ram, there should be very little or any block device access to slow things down so u might get performance as good as arch on the hard drive ...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=28209 -- forum.. larch latest news ..
http://four.fsphost.com/gradgrind/ -- larch site

pecan

Member

Registered: 2007-04-06

Posts: 93

Re: Slax performance

Sounds like a nice distro, but if it doesn't have a performance difference on a system like that and its missing everything Arch is, I think I'll continue as planned and stick with Arch.
Thanks for your input

gradgrind

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 921

Re: Slax performance

My experience with running larch from flash devices (though it is probably somewhat device speed dependent) is that the boot is not quicker (loading kernel and initcpio is slower) but the system is very responsive. Large programs which use many small files, e.g. xorg, kde stuff, start up very quickly, quite a bit faster than from hard drive.

---

larch: http://larch.berlios.de

hacosta

Member

From: Mexico

Registered: 2006-10-22

Posts: 423

Re: Slax performance

i've tried it with the copytoram parameter and it's really fast

vacant

Member

From: downstairs

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 816

Re: Slax performance

The "fastest" distro I use is Puppy Linux which loads totally into ram from hard disk thus:
grub boot entry:

title Puppy
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PMEDIA=ide
initrd /initrd.gz

and on (hd0,2) I have just copied from the Puppy iso:

initrd.gz pup_215.sfs  vmlinuz  zdrv_215.sfs

Lontronics

Member

Registered: 2006-08-28

Posts: 121

Re: Slax performance

@Vacant;

I do not know how much memory you are using; but did you never had problems with running out of memory?

When you are using puppy the way it is, this is probably a very nice way to get a fast system.
But I can imagine that when using larger programs, and as a desktop system which is running longer then an hour, this could be a point?

I am asking because WHEN working, it could be used for other distro's too ofcourse

Jan

vacant

Member

From: downstairs

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 816

Re: Slax performance

did you never had problems with running out of memory?

No problems. I've got 760 MB on my home PC but Puppy ran fine on the old Cybercafé PCs with 128MB (and flies on their 1GB RAM replacements!). I use Puppy for maintenance - such as moving Arch from one partition to another, reinstalling grub when an installation of Windows wipes the dual boot. I've also used it at Cybercafé if a Windows PC goes bad and I want a quick "kiosk-style" browser PC.

It loads itself in RAM (80MB) and you when you quit you get the chance to create a large store, e.g. 512MB. Next time you boot it opens that store as a loopback file system, overlayed with RAM. It's a small download so why not test it to destruction?

Last edited by vacant (2007-05-07 15:28:21)