From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jun 5 22:11:05 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 59C1616A4CE for ; Sat, 5 Jun 2004 22:11:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp.owt.com (smtp.owt.com [204.118.6.19]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F04343D54 for ; Sat, 5 Jun 2004 22:11:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kstewart@owt.com) Received: from [207.41.94.233] (owt-207-41-94-233.owt.com [207.41.94.233]) by smtp.owt.com (8.12.8/8.12.8) with ESMTP id i565AGbI019799; Sat, 5 Jun 2004 22:10:16 -0700 From: Kent Stewart To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 22:11:03 -0700 User-Agent: KMail/1.6.2 References: <1086497281.30075.6.camel@solid.solisixoffice.com> In-Reply-To: <1086497281.30075.6.camel@solid.solisixoffice.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200406052211.03211.kstewart@owt.com> cc: Bruce Hunter Subject: Re: FreeBSD / Gnome Performance Tuning X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2004 05:11:05 -0000 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