On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 07:10:09AM -0500, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote: > >It's at times like these, that I am greatly relieved I'm not a Windows > >user: > > > >http://www.genesis-x.nildram.co.uk/news/article00005.html > > This brings up a question I have about Fedora. I recently installed FC1 > on an 800 MHz Celeron with 128MB RAM.... .... > The first thing I notice in Linux (running GNOME) is that it *seems* > more sluggish than Windows. Menus take longer to pop up. Standard > dialogs take longer to pop up. All sorts of things. Yep.... The single largest pile of stuff to clean up is the way the X window system is used. Now, before the X folk put a contract out on me it is important to note that the X window system is vastly different in design and function than the W thing that MS delivers. The comparison is not fair except that they both paint stuff on the display. The first big speedup you can do is to make sure that localhost.localdomain (i.e. $DISPLAY) is resolved QUICKLY. If you use DNS make sure that the start of authority for localhost.localdomain is on your box or cached. In my experience 99% of the sluggishness in X-windows is host name resolution (forward and reverse lookup). Remember that localhost.localdomain line in /etc/hosts that MUST be there.... The next big step is sort of our of the end users hands and much more difficult. X application programmers and X toolkit developers should run all their work via a slow link (1200 baud SLIP). One of the things that will be apparent is how often X will do the same thing over and over. At the roots X is just fine. Then add all the skin stuff, all the decorations, all the mouse action all the look and feel good stuff layer on top of layer and things get sluggish. SUMMARY: speed up the DNS resolution of $DISPLAY first. -- T o m M i t c h e l l /dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.
