Slow GUI in RedHat 9.0

09-22-2003, 06:11 PM

I'm having P4 1.6GHz m/c with 128MB SDRAM, 40GB HDD. dual boot (30GB for WinXP and 10GB for RedHat linux 9.0). Video chipset is SiS650. I've Generic VESA driver automatically detected and installed by RedHat and Video shared memory is 16MB. My problem is that all of my GUI applications are very slow. It takes 50 seconds to launch the OpenOffice writer 1.0 at first time and second time it takes 40 seconds. Mozilla is also taking 30-40 seconds. the SWAP partition is of 256MB. BOOT partition is of 100MB.
I want to know where the problem lies. Is increasing the SWAP partition from 256MB to 1GB works?
what I've to do now?

**trickster** · 09-22-2003, 06:20 PM

Both OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are known to be memory hogs, so that sounds about right for your configuration.
My personal opinion is that making a bigger swap file may not give you much of an edge, since it is memory stored on disk, and it has to access it from the hard drive, which is much slower than RAM. However, I could be wrong.
If you have the space, give it a try, and if you get no performance boost, go back to 256.

**stryder144** · 09-22-2003, 06:23 PM

There seem to me to be at least two reasons, if not three, for your problem.

First, it is a graphic problem. Your SiS650 is not, shall we say, speedy in the least.

Second, you are only using 16mb for video ram. That is a small amount, especially for the notoriously resource hungry gui's such as KDE and Gnome.

Third, the generic driver might not be the best option here. If you have no problems doing so, I'd pull open a terminal and type in xf86cfg. Try to find your specific graphics chip and let it use the driver for that.

Now, the best solution is one of the following, in my opinion:

1. Buy a new graphics card with an nVidia chip on it (a good budget model will have 128mb of ram on board and will use the GeforceFX 5200 chip. It comes in both PCI and AGP versions...around $100).

2. Try a window manager such as windowmaker (WM) or fluxbox or such...go to this site to find a range of options. If you want a desktop environment that is light on resources try xfce.

HTH

Cheers

**Schotty** · 09-24-2003, 05:14 PM

Do this, and it will be alot smoother.

-Run prelink (rpm is on cd3 I think.)
prelink -aRv

-Disable any unneeded services
-Add more RAM if possible. 256 is really the sweet spot. Obviously more is better.

I run 768MB on a Athlon-900. No slowdowns at all. Styder mentioned the VGA card; possibly. But if you run a screen resolution that is well within the boundaries (like 800x600x32), you should be fine.