Puppy 1.0.7 very slow

[Brian C]

Puppy Linux 1.0.6 seemed to always be pretty fast. But 1.0.7 is acting a lot slower, on both my 500MHz AMD computer and my 1.6GHz Centrino laptop. Is anyone else noticeing this?

[MU]

no, very fast on Pentium3 -700 and celeron 2200.
But bot machines have more than 700 MB of RAM.

What exactly is slow?
Do you boot from a USB-2 -drive?
Maybe CD of low quality?

Mark

[Brian C]

Slow enough that I noticed it. Sometimes In some flash programs, things are very laggy, especially entered text. The dotpup package manager takes longer to initialise, and firefox browses/functions slower.

I'm not sure that it has a lot to do with the CD, since it's in RAM. It's a Memorex music CD rated for 40x. Is it possible that it's using the swap space on the hard drive, which makes it lag? Can I disable that, and still get my pup001 file from the HDD?

[Brian C]

That last post, for example, took more than a minute to submit after I hit "submit"

[bombayrockers]

The speed of puppy is more related to your memory than your processing power. I have noticed that 1.0.7 is slower than 1.0.6. And this has to be expected as puppy grew bigger with the advent of Xorg.

I have 128 Mb ram & pIII. When puppy boots most of my memory is full and when I start apps it starts swapping and swapping is slow as compared to ramdisk. The trick to get 1.0.7 running faster is to make just enough memory available so that usr_cram.fs is in memory but there is still some free memory so that puppy has to swap as little as possible.

So this is what I did to achieve that. I analysed usr_cram.fs and found that the largest chunk of software is mozilla. So I remasterd my usr_cram.fs to remove mozilla. How to do that at this link http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=5118
I did not move mozilla to a new place as I use konqueror from kde. But You could always move mozilla to /root/.usr from usr_cram.fs.

Effect of this -> your browsing experience would be a bit slow because of mozilla on the pupfile but when you are not browsing you would have just memory for other puppy apps so it swap as little as possible.

before remastering my free command would be (using mozilla to browse)
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 125892 122516 3376 0 11556
Swap: 305224 approx 50000

this is the output of my free command now (I am posting from konqueror - so you can imagine that a whole lot of things are loaded in the memory)
free
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 125892 122516 3376 0 11556
Swap: 305224 17592 287632
Total: 431116 140108 291008

This method would work best if you have 128 mb memory for lesser memory you would have to yank more things out of usr_cram.fs.

[Brian C]

I will work in cutting down that file.

I have 256MB of RAM in this computer. I don't think I've downloaded/installed 150+MB stuff onto Puppy, so where is it going? Does puppy expand the files from the CD at boot, or is it a straight 60MB copied to RAM?

[bombayrockers]

Staright 60Mbs get loaded to the memory. The rest is needed for running the apps. Also note that performance is also influenced upon by your X server. Following is the list of my slow to fast X performance

slowest - Xvesa
better - XOrg Vesa mode
best - Xorg plus the appropriate DRI module for my video card.