Arch Linux

broch

Banned

From: L.A. California

Registered: 2006-11-13

Posts: 975

Re: Making things faster on old computer

1) system with KDE properly configured takes (after boot)  88MB so if fluxbox takes 100MB it is simply not worth it (obviously fluxbox will take much less - with proper config).
2) firefox-pgo speed is a myth (plenty of these), you will get better results (speed/memory) with opera
3) make custom small kernel (if you can, there are options in the kernel which are designed but not enabled for systems like yours), this one is not first choice for small setup config.

It all depends how much you want to sacrifice and how much time you are willing to spend on system optimization

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,577

Re: Making things faster on old computer

I thought Firefox-PGO was a myth, too, if you search my posts... until I actually checked some benchmarks... I'll be making some soon, too. PGO isn't a myth by any means, at least. On the other hand, Opera vs Firefox is actually getting very hard to call... it used to be true that Opera was leaner, but if you check Firefox 3.1b3 with PGO and TraceMonkey, I bet the latter could hold its own at the very least. And then you get free software and the legendary extension set (though to be fair this is not as important for this use-case)

Midori, Aurora, Dillo (especially), and Epiphany are perhaps worth considering as well.

broch

Banned

From: L.A. California

Registered: 2006-11-13

Posts: 975

Re: Making things faster on old computer

I did try pgo and I have not seen any particular speed gains. Including all these web based benchmarksof java and whatnot.
Opera vs Firefox: I do not use Opera (I prefer FF interface), however all the recent benchmarks with the latest beta release of Opera would indicate that Opera is faster. And Opera always was faster.
There is a nice comparison of the latest: Opera, Safari, Firefox (not pgo), IE and Chrome on windows. This would give you some idea about the speed.
I forgot the web site, but I think that if you dig Arch forums (month or so) you should find a discussion that also includes the above benchmark).

tjwoosta

Member

Registered: 2008-12-18

Posts: 453

Re: Making things faster on old computer

1) system with KDE properly configured takes (after boot)  88MB so if fluxbox takes 100MB it is simply not worth it (obviously fluxbox will take much less - with proper config).

really?

thats amazing

could you provide a screenshot of this?

i have actually brought fluxbox down even further to about 70MB once, but i had no idea kde could be that slim

broch

Banned

From: L.A. California

Registered: 2006-11-13

Posts: 975

Re: Making things faster on old computer

1) system with KDE properly configured takes (after boot)  88MB so if fluxbox takes 100MB it is simply not worth it (obviously fluxbox will take much less - with proper config).

really?

thats amazing

could you provide a screenshot of this?

i have actually brought fluxbox down even further to about 70MB once, but i had no idea kde could be that slim

why not?
79MB on KDE (I hope that you can recognize KDE decoration if not, I can provide screenshot from my desktop)
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/168/79mb.png
as you see 70MB is not a big deal. 79MB KDE with a whole lot more usability is way better.

89MB
http://img9.imageshack.us/my.php?image=89mb2628zen5.png

I hope also that you know that you should look at
-/+ buffers cache (used) line.

this is with nvidia driver installed, so if you take nvidia driver out, kernel/KDE footprint is ~55MB

back to the original post:
more RAM (as suggested) will be beneficial.
You can also try to offload your NIC.
run this command (terminal window) :
ethtool -k ethX
where X corresponds to the no of your card (e.g. eth0)
you should see something like this:
ethtool -k eth0
Offload parameters for eth0:
rx-checksumming: off
tx-checksumming: off
scatter-gather: off
tcp segmentation offload: off
udp fragmentation offload: off
generic segmentation offload: off

not turn offload on:
sudo ethtool -K eth0 tx on
sudo ethtool -K eth0 rx on
sudo ethtool -K eth0 sg on
sudo ethtool -K eth0 tso on
sudo ethtool -K eth0 ufo on
sudo ethtool -K eth0 gso on

the above will offload CPU so more power to the rest of your apps.
you will need to add these commands to ec.local (without sudo of course) to make it permanent as each reboot will wipe out these parameters.

hope this will help

Last edited by broch (2009-03-16 15:46:47)

Dinth

Member

From: London

Registered: 2009-03-02

Posts: 238

Re: Making things faster on old computer

Is pgo version of Firefox from AUR 100% compatabile with all firefox plugins? Is it stable and full-featured?
If yes, why it isnt default firefox version in Arch and many other distros ?

bwh1969

Member

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 151

Re: Making things faster on old computer

Curiously, I use Chakra (Arch distro) on my Asus eee-pc 701, 900 MHz and Chakra runs fairly quick.  You might want to give it a try as a live distro at first, but I would run it off of a USB drive rather than CD if you wanted a better idea of how fast it would be for you.

broch

Banned

From: L.A. California

Registered: 2006-11-13

Posts: 975

Re: Making things faster on old computer

Is pgo version of Firefox from AUR 100% compatabile with all firefox plugins? Is it stable and full-featured?
If yes, why it isnt default firefox version in Arch and many other distros ?

1) yes it is )(at least no reason why not, profiling has nothing to do with plugins)
2) because there is nothing to gain, if you really need this and believe that it magically helps you can install it easily on your box.

Last edited by broch (2009-03-15 22:41:28)

Joe_Arch

Member

Registered: 2008-11-27

Posts: 67

Re: Making things faster on old computer

I'm suprised no one has mentioned this, but you might want to use htop (or whatever) to figure out what exactly is using all your memory. That info would be very helpful in figuring out which programs to switch.

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,577

Re: Making things faster on old computer

broch, I wouldn't be so hasty to discredit PGO. Firefox builds for Windows are by default done with PGO (this change happened very recently, and Mozilla hinted that Firefox 3.1 Linux builds may be getting PGO), Internet Explorer I read is built with PGO, and Microsoft has a page detailing how to build your Visual Studio apps with PGO, claiming 20% performance increase in some cases. I was already planning on asking the Arch devs why they don't do PGO out of the box -- PGO helps even more if you do it on the box it's intended for, but it can still help a good deal.

There's a fair amount of evidence in favor of PGO, and specifically Firefox with it. PGO is a smart optimization - unlike a lot of 'magical' CFLAGs floating around out there - basically, you compile, run something to put the app through its paces and collect data on what parts of code are used more and in what way, etc., and then you compile again making use of that data.

http://blog.mozilla.org/ted/2008/02/29/speed
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/02/fire … erformance
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/02/25/fire … ts-a-boost
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic … 0#p3274310
http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showthread.php?p=834886

Anyways, I'll shut up now, or we can carry this to another thread. We are losing the topic

asshur

Member

Registered: 2009-03-06

Posts: 18

Re: Making things faster on old computer

on the DE front (and assuming that you're not from of the minimalist class)
Here are my findings, just done this week, on a similary configured computer
Memory footprint (via free) of a default environment. It can go up depending of the MODULES and DEMONS started (critical to check in constrained environments). Cache and buffers excluded
JWM   around  40 MB
IceWM           +4 MB
LXDE             +5 MB
XFCE4         +16 MB
KDE 4.2     +110 MB

with 256 Mb, KDE leaves very little of headroom, and the very small footprint of Jwm and IceWM does not compensate the setup effort they require vs. LXDE and XFCE4.
XFCE4 is gorgeous, but LXDE has really impressed me, and as a KDE user does not feel that strange, if worlds less complete and configurable.
UPDATE I'm even using now Konqueror 4 under LXDE as my default setup for the old machine (way faster than anything firefox, and not a GoogleApps user)

Last edited by asshur (2009-03-17 01:10:37)