Why is my windoze so damned SLOW?

[Gnome]

Ok, I'll keep this simple.

Last night I was transferring stuff of my fileserver that is being transformed into a webserver (Linux/Apache) to my laptop (the only box of mine with a burner).

On the laptop (XP, 2.5G CPU, 512Mb ram, 7200rpm HDD, fastest graphics in the house (but can't remember what exactly), I had Trillian and Netscape 7.2 running, as well as a windoze explorer window. That was all.

The server (Mandrake 10/Gnome, 300Mhz CPU, 190 MB Ram, Nvida Geforce 2 (IIRC) w/ 32Mb ram, several older slower 5400(?) HDD's) was ul'ing the files to the doze box, transferring files to a couple of 'staging areas', doing a file search, handling some printing and also had Mozilla running (but idle).

The doze box was really sluggish under it's load. 25-30 seconds for an IM to send on Trillian, and maybe another 5-10 seconds for the screen to update. Going back to the web page displayed behind the IM window - anything up to 30 seconds, and anything up to another 20 for the page to respond to input.

The Linux box, otoh, was at most 5 seconds to display anything. Starting a new task was a bit slow, but the disk activity was high so that would, I expect, cover the very slight sluggishness.

So.. Why is my new expensive machine running XP so much slower than an old pile of junk I was considering dumping?

Windoze XP? :thumbdwn: :fu:

Linux? :thumbup: :thumbup: ...

I went to linux for the server because of stability and security. I'll probably switch the laptop over to it because of that and, having tried Knoppix out on it, SPEED!


[Oh, and before anyone asks - my nick was given to me due to my physical characteristics in '91, and does not relate to the Gnome desktop)

[Aloone_Jonez]

Good for you, using Gnome rather than KDE, is this for speed too? I've found KDE very slow almoast Windows slow.

I've found Windows slow for compresing fills and also renaiming files on FAT32 partitions. Linux can rename a file in less than a second on my FAT32 partition but Windows takes fucking ages. But I have found the Windows boots quicker than Linux in general.

[ShawnD1]

I've found Windows slow for compresing fills and also renaiming files on FAT32 partitions.

Compressing files is limited by CPU; not the file system. In that case, your beef would be with something like WinZip or WinRAR, not actual Windows.

Gnome, is your problem caused by hard drive lag? What you described is exactly how my computer acts when I'm transfering large amounts of data across the network, or defragging.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Compressing files is limited by CPU; not the file system. In that case, your beef would be with something like WinZip or WinRAR, not actual Windows.

FAT32 is very inefficent and Windows XP has built in ZIP support - I don't have WinZip or WinRAR. When I rename a 500MB file on my FAT32 drive form Linux it takes less than a second when it takes 5 miniutes from XP.

[adiment]

Windowsxp is mainly slow becuase you have to defrag after a fresh install. Also theres many useless services running..like "Messanger" All the eye candy can make it slow as well, but that's not the problem with your specs.

XP's ram management isn't great becuase by default it doesn't unload cached dll's in the memory. All can be changed by simple tweaks.

[Gnome]

Good for you, using Gnome rather than KDE, is this for speed too? I've found KDE very slow almoast windows slow.

I've never compared them. I think when I had Mandrake 9 a year or so back on another machine, I mainly used KDE. This time round I used Gnome by default... Hmm, might explain why some small monitoring apps (like one, think it was named Simsomething or something like that - would give a small display that would let me monitor network speed and cpu use and some other things I could choose.

I've found Windows slow for compresing fills and also renaiming files on FAT32 partitions. Linux can rename a file in less than a second on my FAT32 partition but Windows takes fucking ages. But I have found the Windows boots quicker than Linux in general.

Yup, I've also found that Linux takes longer to boot. But... I don't boot Linux anywhere near as often, so over time I'd spend far less time booting Linux than doze.

I'm not sure what filesystem the laptop is on. Whatever comes with XP.

I've found that doze can be incredibly slow on some of the simplest of tasks.

But IME it still beats Linux for installing software - except that, again, you have to do it far more often with doze (and redo it, and redo it, and redo it, and redo it...)

[Gnome]

XP's ram management isn't great becuase by default it doesn't unload cached dll's in the memory. All can be changed by simple tweaks.

I don't expect to be running it long enough to need to worry about tweaking it anyway.

I've had enough of fixing and tweaking doze. Once I figure out how to get Homeworld running happily under Linux (and maybe a few other games), bye bye doze. And if Trillian can run under Wine, shouldn't take to much to get Homeworld playable..)

[Gnome]

Gnome, is your problem caused by hard drive lag? What you described is exactly how my computer acts when I'm transfering large amounts of data across the network, or defragging.

But surely the Linux box - which has slower drives and was working them harder than the drive in the doze box should have suffered this more?

I expect that is the cause - doze was handling the drive poorly and loosing huge amounts of CPU time to manage what should've some sort of stream to the disk, while the Linux box was happily chugging away, occaisionally looking up in and asking in a mocking tone "Is that all you want me to do?"

(Actually, I get a image of #5 from "Short Circuit" with the regular "More data please" after churning through a ton of books, unable to be sated by mere human input - guess he was running Linux as well?)

[jtpenrod]

But I have found the Windows boots quicker than Linux in general.

Sure Linux takes longer to boot since Linux draws a sharp distinction between apps and the core OS. Win incorporates apps into the OS. It boots faster, and that's a good thing since Windows users do it so often.  

[Aloone_Jonez]

On second thoughts I think it depends on the version of Windows you use. Windows 2000 and previous versions take ages to boot but Microsoft decided to make Windows XP a boot a lot faster by using a techinique they called pre-emptive booting. This involved arranging the system files on the hard disk in the correct boot order on the first boot after installation or a major change to the system. This means lots of files can be load into memory very quickly if not at the same time, while before the hard disk had to go and find each file one after the other. This is my understanding anyway.

[Gnome]

This involved arranging the system files on the hard disk in the correct boot order on the first boot after installation or a major change to the system.

ABSOLUTE RUBBISH!!!

You cannot honestly expect us to believe that mickey$loth has actually managed to properly organize system folders in a logical order, can you?

Isn't that some sort of major sin as far as they're concerned or something? I thought their system fiels were supposed to be either  scattered in one illogical mass of folders, or one huge mess of files dumped in one directory, with nothing even bordering on logical or organised, or even remotely sensible.

And you expect me to believe that they actually have decently (or at least something pretending to approach decently) set things out for a change?

Absolute bollocks.

[wanders off muttering about people with silly ideas]

[toadlife]

ABSOLUTE RUBBISH!!!

You cannot honestly expect us to believe that mickey$loth has actually managed to properly organize system folders in a logical order, can you?

Isn't that some sort of major sin as far as they're concerned or something? I thought their system fiels were supposed to be either scattered in one illogical mass of folders, or one huge mess of files dumped in one directory, with nothing even bordering on logical or organised, or even remotely sensible.

And you expect me to believe that they actually have decently (or at least something pretending to approach decently) set things out for a change?

Absolute bollocks.

[wanders off muttering about people with silly ideas]

Actually I think XP boots faster because it loads the neccessary services needed to show you the login screen first. Windows 2000 would load all of the background services before showing you the login screen, therefore making it seem a lot slower.

[adiment]

XP boots much slower than 2000 becuase of all of it's useless services

[Aloone_Jonez]

ABSOLUTE RUBBISH!!!

You cannot honestly expect us to believe that mickey$loth has actually managed to properly organize system folders in a logical order, can you?

Isn't that some sort of major sin as far as they're concerned or something? I thought their system fiels were supposed to be either  scattered in one illogical mass of folders, or one huge mess of files dumped in one directory, with nothing even bordering on logical or organised, or even remotely sensible.

And you expect me to believe that they actually have decently (or at least something pretending to approach decently) set things out for a change?

Absolute bollocks.

[wanders off muttering about people with silly ideas]

Not not the folders but the order of the information on the physical disk surface.

e7ement,
You're the first person I've heard say that, have you run Windows XP and 2000 on the same hardware before?

I don't agree with Microsoft on many things but I do in this instance.

Booting

When a computer boots, many things have to happen, such as the initialization of devices and a wide variety of system functions and services. Several important changes have been made in Windows XP that dramatically reduce the time it takes for this initialization process to complete.

These changes include the following:

Improvements to the Boot Loader

Improvements to the boot loader and to a number of key drivers have made them much faster. Registry initialization is also faster, and many manufacturers have dramatically reduced the time taken by their BIOS prior to running the operating system.

I/O Can Be Overlapped with Device Initialization

Using Windows

[Shiver]

Windoze XP does boot fast, but I can only laugh at the idea it's because of any special file arrangement or such. Just look at file table using any defragmenter and you'll notice that the windoze partition has thousands of fragmented files after a couple of days since the last defragmentation - even though it was run with optimizations such as placing the files in order of last access.

On the other hand, the boot-up time on Linux depends on what distro, software and services you use. Many "regular" distros seem to come with a huge load of unneccessary stuff to make sure they run on as many systems as possible, as well as a kernel that has support for everything. My Suse 9.3 takes maybe a minute to boot up, when I tried Gentoo, it took about as long as windoze to get to the point where the login screen appears. I didn't have KDE load automatically so I can't say for sure but judging by the time Suse takes to get to the same point where Gentoo stops in text mode, it's pretty fast. Too bad I couldn't get anything else working properly on Gentoo so I switched back to Suse.