FreeBSD / Gnome Performance Tuning

[Kent Stewart]

On Saturday 05 June 2004 09:48 pm, Bruce Hunter wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> I have noticed that my system isn't as fast as the windows gui is.
> Probably has to do with Gnome and GTK 2.0 issues. Is there anything I
> can do, to increase system wide performance? Either harddrive access
> time, or gui performance when running multiple apps?
>

It depends on what you are comparing. For example, I think the numerical 
libraries in Windows are significantly faster than FreeBSD. On the same 
system, I see ~25% more wu's calculated by setiathome from the Windows 
XP side than are processed on the FreeBSD 4.x side.

I could be wrong on where the 25% speed gain is coming from but the 
difference is there. I added the cpu_time from the report that is 
uploaded to Berkely into a spread sheet and then compared the averages 
once I had accrued more than 200 wu's by each OS. You need to process 
several hundred wu's before the really short running ones ceased to 
affect the first few digits in the average.

Look while you are doing some gui stuff and see if you are swapping. 
Your 8ns memory suddenly becomes equivalent to your HD average access 
time at that point and everything is going to run slower. I started 
looking at swapinfo on systems that I did port builds and frequent 
system builds and upped the memory until I quit swapping. The first DDR 
was 512 and it swapped. The 2nd DDR stick was also 512 and it didn't 
swap. 

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html