Started 2007-05-17. Brief investigation of speed on a fairly old system, purely with a view to the most suitable sofware for someone wanting a tolerable fast response for basic web, music and word-processing functions. Others who write in vim, browse in links2 (yuk), and play music with mplayer in the console might not be very interested. Brief summary, times in seconds, parenthesised values for `cold-start' with program not previously run since boot, ~333-500MHz Intel CPU, 128MB RAM. gentoo and fbsd cases used Abiword-2.4 as word-processor; times for ooffice22 are in [] for gentoo; gentoo perhaps has different default configs or has taken better advantage of USE optimisations (it was compiled locally). Task mswindosxp gentoo2007.0 fbsd6.2 word-processor (4),<1 (4),3[(15),6] (19),15 web-browser (4),~1 (15),4 (7),6 file-manager (3),~1 (15),4 (7),6 music-player (3),~1 -- (6),4 power-to-desktop 50-60s ~86s 125s! system-halt ~10s 25s 16s Here, I have a `Celeron' 333MHz and a PIII 500MHz laptop (Dell Latitude). It would be interesting to have some idea of what software (OS, desktop, apps) is better suited to these fairly old systems, and to check whether gentoo's extremes of adding support for everything to everything (USE="long list") e.g. smb and nfs and ftp and ... support in all file-managers, gui support in everything, or alternatively keeping things very minimal, makes much difference. The difference might be seen on any system, but it becomes more easily measured and more free-memory dependent on these slow ones. Disk usage is also of interest: can gentoo, without the portage tree, be made efficiently small? ms-windos is often snubbed as appallingly bloated and bad on anything even a little old: this may well be true of the latest insult (vista) but is not really true of the previous systems versus contemporary non-frugal Free *nix desktops, gnome and KDE; still less is it so in comparing the ms office `suite' with the only really competent Free WYSIAYG Office thing, OpenOffice(.org)! Mercifully, (in this case) there is no chance of varying compiler options, USE flags, etc. in the ms case, so there's only one set of measurements to make there! Older versions, e.g. win98 could be considerd. For the rest, just Gentoo will be used (linux kernel), in at least two variants: a quite full system and a minimal one with only a light desktop and utilities. Best optimisations for CPU will of course be used: this is a fair advantage of Free software (and I'd be interested sometime to see just how much difference it makes on matters other than number crunching -- perhaps not much!). Perhaps OpenOffice will have to be included, but it would be utterly hopeless without a quite good disk and plenty of RAM. Abiword could be considered as a light alternative. The same disk -- an old 12GB thing -- is to be used in all cases. PIII 500MHz, 128MB RAM. ms-windos xp pro sp2, new installation. Cold start: power button to desktop loaded and disk not going flat out: 75(rec.from.ser.error.mesg), then 50, 54 ---> 50-60s Power Off (from logged in -- no use since start): 9, 10, 13 Open ie browser first time: 3 Open msword first time: 4 Open winmedia first time: 3 Reopen ie browser: 1 Reopen filemanager: 1 Reopen office program: <1 (0.7?) Reopen winmedia: <1 (0.7?) Feels absolutely acceptable for responsiveness for the basics of opening things, which is all that really matters for someone not dealing with editing huge or high-graphics documents or running long calculations. Celeron 333MHz, 256MB RAM Cold-start time more around 60s; not huge difference (should check diff in BIOS->system time!) Speeds of first and subsequent starts of applications very similar to ones above: measureed generally a little longer (some 10%, say) but low precision of measurement makes this hardly worth considering. Not bad! Change system. FreeBSD i386 v6.2, from 1st installation CD only. Going for compactness: base system is option 9, basic user, binary and doc only with X; X is with basic options (not nested server etc.). After base system, had just disk usage of 450MB(/usr) and 36MB(/), with the /usr size increasing to 1.5GB after installation of tetex, xmms, xine, xfce4+manyaddons, bash, firefox opera, thunderbird, ... (not KDE/Gnome). Computer is now just the Celeron 333MHz, but now with half the RAM removed: 128MB. Power button to login console prompt, when hurrying the bootloader menus: ~55s startx to xfce4 being loaded: ~34s powerbutton to power-off for shutting down (from xfce4): 16 Note: cold-start values here are just tried once, in order xffm, xmms, firefox, opera, thunderbird, abiword. Cold/re start simple filemanager (xffm): 15 , 10 Cold/re start firefox-2.0 23 , 16 Cold/re start opera-9.x 11 , 6 Cold/re start thunderbird 20 , 16 Cold/re start Abiword-2.4: 19 , 15 Cols/re start xmms: 6 , 4 Now, install (ready compiled, from packages) KDE and some components, v 3.5.4. When logged in, konqueror web or filemanage (with preload 1 instance set in config) takes some 6-7s first time and 5-6 s subsequent times. The konsole terminal takes about 4 then 3s. kword takes 13s then 9s. kpdf takes 9 then 5s. Firefox still takes 15s even for a restart! So, all abysmal by comparison with mswin, and it's interesting that KDE was actually rather good compared to apparently simpler things -- perhaps not so good with v little memory. The mozilla apps are known for clunkiness, but there isn't much else other than (non-Free) Opera to do the same job. Perhaps having konqueror and even KDE would be worth it! vmstat's avm (active virtual memory) gives 25MB after boot to command prompt, 125 after KDE login, and back to 27MB after logout, reaching a max of 157 with several things open. Times for starting with KDE: 25s power-on to kernel booting, 60 power on to login prompt (console). startx to X-visible is 10s, but startx to KDE loaded (no kdm) is ~65s. Very slow. Now tried gentoo-2007.0 (linux-based distribution, with many shell and python scripts in the startup and with packages usually compiled in site with selection of compiler and functionality options). Untarred stage3-i686 tarball (base system). Didn't recompile to add the rather paltry Celeron optimisation. Took a few days to compile X, konqueror, xfce4, abiword. Installed openoffice and mozilla-firefox as binary packages. Boot: 15s powerbutton to bootloader (as in all cases), kernel took about 6-8s, further ~42s till login prompt with minimal services (just net.ra0 in default level). Total powerbutton to prompt time (inc. bootloader screen etc.) is ~68s. At login prompt, ~21MB memory use. startxfce4: 22s very first time, 18s cold, 11s warm (re-login). In all cases, ~9s from startxfce4 to seeing X appear on screen. gterm, 4s first, then 2s firefox-bin, ~12s, then 8s opera, 9s then 5s konqueror, (22 firstrun), ? cold, 4s hot, openoffice-bin: Started from shell, 35s, then 23s, Started from xfce4 menu icon, ?s then ~7s! (looks different: from menu it's more GTKish and has very few icons) (ok -- that's it -- the menu says "writer" but the result is as though ooffice2 had been called rather than oowriter2 as I did from the shell trying to be fair; so it's a command thing, not environment.) abiword(2.4): about 4s very first time, 3s after (to a ready page) Now try the laptop obtained from EME in June 2007 -- a Latitude C800, 700 MHz with 512MB RAM and mswindos xp pro apparently installed about 2 years ago. The interesting thing here is the extra applications (fairly typical, many with their annoying startup things to waste time) and that the system has presumably had some time to get slow and tedious. Shutdown from login screen to poweroff: ~20s. Startup ~10s from button to splash screen for os, and ~57s from button to login screen without egg-timer (about 47 with egg-timer). Then after login about 4s to silly background, 6s more to apparent toolbar, and total of about 45s to desktop without egg-timers and splashes (F-secure being the most annoying). Start msword: 60 first time (configuring ....). Then ~2s. Start mspowerpoint: ~5s first time, then 1-2s. Similarly msexcel. So, apparently although the application starting times are very good for ms office, the speed of startup and login gets slow on an old installation; not a thorough test as I can't be bothered to reinstall this one's system rather than just replacing it with gentoo, and the hard-disk may account for a lot of the startup speed and may even have been better on the much lower spec. system on which the newly installed winxp was tried earlier. Note also, "truetype" seems not to be enabled for the general menus and dialogues: much nicer with it enabled.