Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 21:47:34 +1100 From: David Gerard <fun@thingy.apana.org.au> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU Message-ID: <20050121104734.GX22814@thingy.apana.org.au> In-Reply-To: <41F09F43.1080300@incubus.de> References: <200501200929.j0K9TXbl022106@mp.cs.niu.edu> <41EF92A2.30506@incubus.de> <237219580.20050120154929@wanadoo.fr> <20050120153926.GO22814@thingy.apana.org.au> <41F09F43.1080300@incubus.de>
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Matthias Buelow (mkb@incubus.de) [050121 17:21]: > David Gerard wrote: > >So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other > >cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory. > My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, > Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow. A > large factor here is the Xft font rendering (Ok, you could use xterm > instead of gnome-terminal, or switch off antialiasing), which is > unaccelerated (at least was then), and _brutally_ slow. If you run > something with copious output in gnome-terminal, it'll more or less lock > up the entire machine. I don't normally use Gnome, but evaluated it on > that old machine for some reason that is of no interest here. KDE is a > bit faster, don't know why, but seems to use more RAM. IMHO you need at > least a 2.8 or 3GHz P-IV for that kind of desktop to get things to run > well, and, in my experience, raw CPU power here is the dominating > factor. Hrmmm. OK, I was guessing on GNOME. I have read that pango is grossly CPU-hungry, but that the project is keenly aware of the problem. (But refuses to do the easy thing of special optimisation for ISO-8859-1, specifically so that the international stuff will actually get attention.) And that this is the big problem with Gnome terminal. > Of course these machines are still perfectly usable with > windowmaker, or fvwm, or similar. That's why the underpowered Debian laptop uses twm with programs launched from an xterm ;-) - d.
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