Re: Memory Issues

[David Lloyd <lloy0076 rebel net au>]

Hi There!

Firstly:

The default libraries and kernels that come with most distributions are
painfully slow. If you are a GNOME user and want speed then I would
suggest that you rebuild the kernel at least, and possibly glibc, gtk+,
gnome and X. It will make a difference.

Secondly:

Mozilla is a memory hog. However, the milestone releases are normally
fantastically slow. I would surmise they have a whole pile of debugging
(sh! t) in there and other such stuff. At the very least rebuild it, at
the best get one of the CVS snapshots and build from that. Mozilla M17
was an absolute pain.

Optimising Mozilla is even more difficult. Although it uses autoconf
(./configure stuff), it's been customised for the aliens and trying to
work out what turns on optimisation is painful to say the least. At one
time I had developed a set of sed/awk macros to manually override
various flags because it was easier.

Furthermore, Mozilla reads a XUL specification (XUL is, from what I can
tell, an XML dtd) to render itself. It uses some odd combination of
JavaScript/Java and C++. Whilst XUL allows for multitudes of
configurations, skins and so forth it is slow. It is very slow.

Thirdly:

X is a huge memory hog. Most GUI's are. That's the price for all the
pretty graphics and so forth. Furthermore you should be aware that when
you are in X, your card draws pixels as opposed to plcing characters
(unless you're on a PowerPC Macintosh but that's another story) which is
a lot slower. A fast video card with oodles of memory doesn't hurt.

If you're using Enlightenment you might want to switch to Sawfish.

Interested in my system?

I have a:

650Mhz Athlon (original)
392Mb of memory
5400RPM WD 17G HDD

I have rebuilt and optimised with compiler flags:

kernel
gtk+
gnome
glib
glibc
XFree86 4.01
Mozilla
Xchat
The Gimp

My system is significantly faster than the original default RH 6.2
install.

DL
-- 
GOD SAVE AMERICA!
 - because President Bush, the Second Will Not!