Mark Hobley wrote:
> Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> How do you reckon? Have you measured memory usage? What are the paging rates
>> you are seeing?
>
> I didn't measure any benchmarks.

So your reckoning is based on guesswork and intuition and not on measurements.

I was not really talking about running benchmarks. Whatever you are running
when your system is too slow is a suitable load for measuring paging rates

man vmstat

If you are not paging much, then you have enough RAM and the slow
performance is due to something other than too heavy a windowing system or
desktop manager you are running. Perhaps because your CPU is too slow. As I
said earlier, running with 550 MHz Pentium IIIs on a 512 MByte system does
not get sluggish performance for me.

> They are not always useful. A system
> can still be sluggish, with jerky mouse movements, constant disk
> accesses, and slow resposiveness in opening and closing applications,
> even though benchmarks for the system say that the machine is performing
> well.

I wonder to what benchmarks you refer.

Jerky mouse movements, slow responsiveness in opening and closing
applications, etc., might be due to sluggish disk performance, for example.
If you do not measure these things, you are just guessing.
>
> A high end Pentium 4 based machine running Microsoft Windows XP, for
> example may obtain better benchmark results than my basic 750 Mhz
> desktop machine running a lightweight window manager. However, my system
> is more responsive from a usability point of view, because I do not get
> egg timers on the screen, and my applications open as soon as I click
> them.
>
> Mark.
>


--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
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^^-^^ 15:10:01 up 9 days, 21:16, 4 users, load average: 4.11, 4.17, 4.24

Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8@verizon.net> wrote:

> So your reckoning is based on guesswork and intuition and not on measurements.

Yeah. I can tell its slow by using it.

> I was not really talking about running benchmarks. Whatever you are running
> when your system is too slow is a suitable load for measuring paging rates
>
> man vmstat
>
> If you are not paging much, then you have enough RAM and the slow
> performance is due to something other than too heavy a windowing system or
> desktop manager you are running. Perhaps because your CPU is too slow. As I
> said earlier, running with 550 MHz Pentium IIIs on a 512 MByte system does
> not get sluggish performance for me.

It is is Window Manager related, I am sure. Debian on the same system
using a lightweight window manager runs fine.

> Jerky mouse movements, slow responsiveness in opening and closing
> applications, etc., might be due to sluggish disk performance, for example.
> If you do not measure these things, you are just guessing.

Yeah. The disk is being over-utilized by processes running in Ubuntu. I
reckon this is something running to drive the desktop.

In my case these are typical Maxtor drives of 20Gb or above attached to
the IDE interface in a typical single drive configuration on a conventional
IBM compatible computer. There is nothing odd about these computers and
they perform like any other in their class:

Debian runs Quickly.
Ubuntu runs slowly.

I'll boot of the Ubuntu live CD and publish some benchmarks, if required.
The Live CD never stops spinning on these machines and performance of the
desktop is absolutely awful.

The graphics cards are ATI Radeon 9000 and 9200 series cards with
support for open source 3d accelleration, so I know that the problem is
not with the cards. (Again, they work fine in Debian.)

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley,
393 Quinton Road West,
Quinton, BIRMINGHAM.
B32 1QE.