Re: [SLE] Has The performance been forgotten?

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 02:14 -0700, Bahram Alinezhad wrote:
> Thank you for your notice,
> I want to add some comments:
> 
> 1- My Linux setup and boot are on default settings (In
> fact, I am not so foolish to add unused services to
> the boot progress!)

Unused services will affect initial bootup time, but shouldn't have a
lot of effect at runtime, especially if unused - they'll sit there and
do nothing.

If boot time matters, though, disable them.  If security matters,
disable them.  ;-)

> 3- In both Linuces, I've installed nVIDIA binary
> driver (61.06) that works well, better than Windows
> drivers; But this driver only affects 3d games, no
> considerable difference in other programs.

You might try enabling the (experimental) Render acceleration, which can
potentially increase speed a lot, especially for text rendering.

> 
> 4- When I speak about the applications, I mean the
> time for invoke them, not the time for doing special
> tasks inside.
> 
> 5- I became tired in trying install Gnome 2.6 on both
> SuSE 9.1 and RedHat 9.0; Generally, installed RPM
> packages prevent the detection of newer versions
> installed from source code; In addition, removing the
> old rpm ruins the system... Gnome 2.8?! I see only 2.6
> in the site!

The front page of gnome.org definitely has 2.8 plastered all over it.
Note that 2.8 *just* came out in the last week or two.

For installing GNOME, I'd suggest using garnome (google for it), which
will not mess with your current RPM-based installation.

> 
> 6- My intention is not hiding the great advantages of
> linux systems, such as: no need for restart, being
> open-source and many more; I wish its desktop would be
> faster.

We all would.  ;-)

> 
> 7- The file system used here is ext3.
> 
> 8- How much features do you think SuSE have that is
> worth putting your hand under your chin for several
> seconds after any click?

None, of course; it should be quite snappy.  SuSE should be pretty
quick.  Your "benchmarks" only showed GNOME running on RH9, which is why
I suggested trying GNOME on SUSE.

The best thing you can do now is profile the desktop (there are some on-
going discussions on the development list about getting good
documentation on how to do this).  The problem is, while you can easily
see that things are slow, a lot of *our* machines aren't.  And, even
when they are, we're talking millions of lines of code that the problems
are hiding in - good profiling can cut down the search to the specific
areas of code which makes the issues far more feasible to fix.

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.