[Smaug] X running slow?

[Meg McRoberts]

Something else to check is whether your configuration runs
better with DMA on or off.  It seems to be off by default
for most configurations -- I'm still trying to wrap my
head around the variations...

Anyhow, run hdparm -t /dev/hda to time the buffered disk
reads.  Then run hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda to turn on dma and
run the hdparm -t test again -- compare the numbers and
see which is faster.

On my system, the performance went from 14MB in 3.73 seconds
to 120MB in 3.73 seconds -- fairly significant.

If your system is faster with dma on, edit the
/etc/sysconfig/harddisks file and change the DMA parameter --
I forget exactly what it is but if you search for DMA,
you'll find it.

There was a good article in one of the online journals a
couple months ago that suggested this and some other
tunings.  I haven't had as dynamic results with the
others but I'm still studying -- my performance for
Firefox seems to degrade after a few days...  I know,
if I'd do the Windows thing and reboot a couple times
day, I wouldn't have this problem ;-)

Someone at work has been playing with TCP tunings also
and finding that it buys him a lot -- the defaults have
to be set to work for dial-up lines and really old
modems.  If anyone is interested, I can dig out the
recommendations he has.

meg

--- Peter Belew <abcruzww at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some tools to look at what's going on with memory would
> be 'top' and 'vmstat' .... also look at /proc/meminfo .
> 
>  Peter
> 
> On 11/9/05, james sheldon <jsheldon at ucsc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I'm running the latest version of ubuntu, and X seems really slow on my
> > computer, which runs XP fairly decently.  Any thoughts as to how I might
> > optimize X-windows?
> >
> > -James
> >
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> >
> >
> 
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