Enough of this foolishness. I'm not interested in advocacy/lunacy
threads. Please don't post to this thread unless you know what
you're talking about and have something useful to contribute.

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:21:06 -0400, Swampee wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:12:02 -0600, Zinn wrote:
>
>
>> I don't think it says anything relevant. I don't think the system "knows"
>> it's frozen. It's just wildly swapping in and out of the hard disk. On
>> one occasion, my Linux box started freezing up (I could tell because the
>> mouse started moving jerkily). I ran to my Windows box, which had an
>> ssh window into it open, and typed something that would kill any process
>> with a name containing "ozilla" (on the hunch that Mozilla was the culprit).
>> The characters echoed back at about 1 every 15 minutes. I let the
>> thing run out of curiosity. About 6 hours later, Mozilla was in
>> fact killed and the system was usable again. (Another triumph for the
>> Penguin!). The system didn't think anything anomalous had happened.
>> It just seems that Red Hat 9 isn't very good at handling stressful memory
>> situations.
>
> You are witnessing Linux at it's worst.

If so, fine. Tell me how to see it at its best.

> Linux simply can't perform under load and it's starts to fall apart.
> In fact, like you have seen, Linux doesn't even know when it is frozen
> solid.

Can someone here please prove this guy wrong? I'm not getting any
feedback.

In particular, is a move to Fedora Core 2 likely to worsen my problems or
improve them? What about FreeBSD? Does anyone have any suggestions?

> Try the same experiment under Windows XP and see the difference. Windows
> will keep on humming while Linux falls to pieces. Linux=shit.

I've heard lots of opinions to the effect that some OS is shit and some
other OS is the answer to all your problems. Well, I already have both
Windows and Linux systems working here, so there isn't going to be some
blinding revelation that one or the other is great and the other sucks.
As it stands, Windows is working well for me and Linux isn't. That
doesn't necessarily mean Linux=shit, but it'd be nice if one of these
people here who thinks Linux is so great could tell me what to do to
make it perform decently.

So, even if your opinion is true, it doesn't help me. I want both
Windows and Unix systems. If Linux=shit, show me what unix variant is
going to give me decent performance and stop wasting my time.

As for my own opinion, I suspect Linux is basically just a mediocre unix
variant with a lot of mindshare. It's not shit and it's not great.
People tout it for great stability and performance. That's kind of
stupid. The days of unstable desktop OS's ended years ago. I use Linux
because it's popular and most desktop unix software targets Linux first.
In the past 10 years, I've used Windows 2000, OS/2, Mac OSX, Linux,
FreeBSD, and Solaris. They're all stable. Why wouldn't they be?
Protected memory, preemptive multitasking, maturity ... It's not that
astonishing. I'd put Linux at or near the bottom of the pack, as do most
knowledgeable people I know who aren't on a jihad, but the pack consists
of modern, stable, straight forward OS's. It's not strange that a
mediocre one becomes the most popular; MS ruled the world for 15 years
with DOS and Windows 3.x, which truly were shit.

I've never really had stability problems with any of the OS's I mention,
except Linux, but even Linux is pretty stable. I don't see anything
particularly exceptional, good or bad, about Linux. It's just pretty
surprising to see this low a level of performance out of reasonably fast
hardware. A PIII 866 with 384 MB ram isn't cutting edge, but it's plenty
good enough to run a web browser and a text editor, isn't it? And this
thing isn't performing as well as Windows 2000 on a PII 450. Something's
up, but what?

>>> Provide as much relevant information as possible.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Larry

Zinn wrote:
>
> Can someone here please prove this guy wrong? I'm not getting any
> feedback.

The first thing I would do would be to change to a different
distro. Oh yeah I already have. Anyways RedHat is bloated. Try
Mandrake it uses RPM packages like RedHat does.

> In particular, is a move to Fedora Core 2 likely to worsen my problems or
> improve them? What about FreeBSD? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Fedora Core is basically a testing ground for RedHat.

> I've never really had stability problems with any of the OS's I mention,
> except Linux, but even Linux is pretty stable. I don't see anything
> particularly exceptional, good or bad, about Linux. It's just pretty
> surprising to see this low a level of performance out of reasonably fast
> hardware. A PIII 866 with 384 MB ram isn't cutting edge, but it's plenty
> good enough to run a web browser and a text editor, isn't it? And this
> thing isn't performing as well as Windows 2000 on a PII 450. Something's
> up, but what?

Just a couple of things that could cause a distro to be slow is:
Network not setup properly.
A bunch of servers running.
And a few other things like running GNOME or KDE.

If your having stability problems with Linux then you need to
start checking hardware. (Memory, CPU fans, etc..) Some of the
speed can depend on where on the disk Linux is installed.

--
Confucius: He who play in root, eventually kill tree.
Registered with The Linux Counter. http://counter.li.org/
Slackware 9.1.0 Kernel 2.4.26 SMP i686 (GCC) 3.3.4
Uptime:11:37, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.02, 1.01

In article <zPOdncVEgrnPd1bd4p2dnA@comcast.com> (Sat, 12 Jun 2004 23:46:58
-0600), Zinn wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:21:06 -0400, Swampee wrote:
>
>> Linux simply can't perform under load and it's starts to fall apart.
>
> Can someone here please prove this guy wrong?

It's impossible: Swampee is a troll. Its only purpose on Usenet is to get
the attention it doesn't get elsewhere.

> In particular, is a move to Fedora Core 2 likely to worsen my problems or
> improve them?

What's the problem? Performance?

The (potential) problem with Fedora, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE is they
tend to load much more software than the average user needs. This may be
a drain on performance. OTOH, those distributions have many satisfied
users.

> What about FreeBSD?

Is it a good operating system? It appears that it is.

I thought about running FreeBSD about 18 months ago but it didn't support
my serial adapter. Now it does. I might try it this summer.

> I'd put Linux at or near the bottom of the pack

So, you're just another troll...

> as do most knowledgeable people I know who aren't on a jihad

....and one of the low-life, Microsoft sock-puppet trolls.

> A PIII 866 with 384 MB ram isn't cutting edge, but it's plenty
> good enough to run a web browser and a text editor, isn't it?

It's more than enough, but possibly not enough to run GNOME or KDE.

> Something's up, but what?

Trollitis?

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.advocacy.]
Error BR-549: MS DRM 1.0 rejects the following post from Zinn:

> I've heard lots of opinions to the effect that some OS is shit and some
> other OS is the answer to all your problems. Well, I already have both
> Windows and Linux systems working here, so there isn't going to be some
> blinding revelation that one or the other is great and the other sucks.
> As it stands, Windows is working well for me and Linux isn't. That
> doesn't necessarily mean Linux=shit, but it'd be nice if one of these
> people here who thinks Linux is so great could tell me what to do to
> make it perform decently.

Looks like, with your attitude, you are on your own, cowboy.

> So, even if your opinion is true, it doesn't help me. I want both
> Windows and Unix systems. If Linux=shit, show me what unix variant is
> going to give me decent performance and stop wasting my time.

You're the one wasting your time.

--
Free as in freedom

[snips]

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:49:47 -0600, Hamilcar Barca wrote:

>> A PIII 866 with 384 MB ram isn't cutting edge, but it's plenty
>> good enough to run a web browser and a text editor, isn't it?
>
> It's more than enough, but possibly not enough to run GNOME or KDE.

It's quite sufficient to run KDE, thanks.

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 11:16:26 -0600, Zinn wrote:

> I'm getting some rather poor performance out of a Red Hat 9
> system with PIII 866 Coppermine, and 384 MB PC133 ram. At least
> part of the problem seems to be memory related. First off,
> the applications I'm using are sucking up enormous amounts
> of ram. All the apps I typically keep open are:
> Mozilla
> XEmacs
> Pan
> Evolution
> Gnome-terminal
> Nautilus (kept open by Gnome)

I never figured out what was wrong with RH9 but the performance is awful.
I used to run RH7.3 which was fine. When I installed RH9 I noticed that it
was really sluggish on my 512M 500MHz PIII system. I did some benchmarking
and it confirmed what I had noticed, launching Xemacs 10 times took 4x as
long on RH9 as on 7.3. I've since switched to Mandrake. MDK9.2 is even
faster than RH7.3 was and MDK10.0 is faster still. I recommend MDK9.2 over
10.0. Although 10.0 is pretty good for a .0 it's definitely not as stable
as 9.2. The only caveat on MDK 9.2 is to make sure that you have 9.2.1 or
that you don't have an LG CDROM. MDK9.2 had a bug that fried LG CDROMs
(it's strictly an LG problem, all others are fine). They fixed it in 9.2.1
but you can only download that one if you are a MandrakeClub member
($120/year). MDK10.0 has no known fatal problems but it does have a few
rough edges and the 2.6 kernel in it is early (2.6.3) so it's not as
stable as you would like.

Zinn wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:21:06 -0400, Swampee wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:12:02 -0600, Zinn wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I don't think it says anything relevant. I don't think the system
>>> "knows" it's frozen. It's just wildly swapping in and out of the
>>> hard disk. On one occasion, my Linux box started freezing up (I
>>> could tell because the mouse started moving jerkily). I ran to my
>>> Windows box, which had an
>>> ssh window into it open, and typed something that would kill any
>>> process with a name containing "ozilla" (on the hunch that Mozilla
>>> was the culprit). The characters echoed back at about 1 every 15
>>> minutes. I let the
>>> thing run out of curiosity. About 6 hours later, Mozilla was in
>>> fact killed and the system was usable again. (Another triumph for
>>> the Penguin!). The system didn't think anything anomalous had
>>> happened.
>>> It just seems that Red Hat 9 isn't very good at handling stressful
>>> memory situations.
>>
>> You are witnessing Linux at it's worst.
>
> If so, fine. Tell me how to see it at its best.

Hmm. given the six hour timeframe, I wonder if you were seeing something
else. For example, if Mozilla was running some out-of-date 3rd party Jave
widget, killing Mozilla would kill off the widget as well and free up your
system.

And if you ever get in this state again, try to do a "telinit 2" to kill off
the standard X login, then do a "telinit 5" to get your X login back, unless
you've been using "startx" to start X from a shell prompt.

Last, you *have* been doing all the updates, including the big Mozilla
updates for RH9 from last year, right? They should be on an FTP site near
you. For RedHat 9, I recommend installing the "autorpm" tool from
www.autorpm.org to set up with a local FTP site and keep your stuff up to
date.

>> Linux simply can't perform under load and it's starts to fall apart.
>> In fact, like you have seen, Linux doesn't even know when it is
>> frozen solid.
>
> Can someone here please prove this guy wrong? I'm not getting any
> feedback.
>
> In particular, is a move to Fedora Core 2 likely to worsen my
> problems or improve them? What about FreeBSD? Does anyone have any
> suggestions?

FreeBSD is so wonderfully stable and secure that it's barely entered the
21st century. Core 2 is a nice RedHat distribution, but it's fairly
seriously bloated: I'd rip most of the KDE stuff out with a dull putty knife
to recover half of my CPU, and yank out "nautilus" and "mc" to get back half
of my CPU cycles when not under load.

>> Try the same experiment under Windows XP and see the difference.
>> Windows will keep on humming while Linux falls to pieces. Linux=shit.
>
> I've heard lots of opinions to the effect that some OS is shit and
> some other OS is the answer to all your problems. Well, I already
> have both Windows and Linux systems working here, so there isn't
> going to be some blinding revelation that one or the other is great
> and the other sucks. As it stands, Windows is working well for me
> and Linux isn't. That doesn't necessarily mean Linux=shit, but it'd
> be nice if one of these people here who thinks Linux is so great
> could tell me what to do to
> make it perform decently.

Give us your overall specs: the basic speed and RAM and disk of your CPU,
what you're comfortable with, and what you need to do.

> As for my own opinion, I suspect Linux is basically just a mediocre
> unix variant with a lot of mindshare. It's not shit and it's not
> great. People tout it for great stability and performance. That's
> kind of stupid. The days of unstable desktop OS's ended years ago.
> I use Linux because it's popular and most desktop unix software
> targets Linux first. In the past 10 years, I've used Windows 2000,
> OS/2, Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. They're all stable.
> Why wouldn't they be? Protected memory, preemptive multitasking,
> maturity ... It's not that astonishing. I'd put Linux at or near the
> bottom of the pack, as do most knowledgeable people I know who aren't
> on a jihad, but the pack consists of modern, stable, straight
> forward OS's. It's not strange that a mediocre one becomes the most
> popular; MS ruled the world for 15 years with DOS and Windows 3.x,
> which truly were shit.

If you need to run servers, or do development from source code because there
is no tool in the world that does what you want, Linux is your friend due to
its heavily GPL licensed code and very open user community. I've worked with
half a dozen UNIX's over the ears: I vastly prefer Linux because I can get
the damn source code, and the developer community pays attention when you
suggest modifications, especially if you send them the patches.

> I've never really had stability problems with any of the OS's I
> mention, except Linux, but even Linux is pretty stable. I don't see
> anything particularly exceptional, good or bad, about Linux. It's
> just pretty surprising to see this low a level of performance out of
> reasonably fast hardware. A PIII 866 with 384 MB ram isn't cutting
> edge, but it's plenty good enough to run a web browser and a text
> editor, isn't it? And this thing isn't performing as well as
> Windows 2000 on a PII 450. Something's up, but what?

Good question. Start by making sure you've done all the updates, and
consider hopping to Fedora Core 2 for the 2.6 kernel and superior "htree"
handling of the filesystem if you need to run servers.

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:49:47 -0600, Hamilcar Barca wrote:

> In article <zPOdncVEgrnPd1bd4p2dnA@comcast.com> (Sat, 12 Jun 2004 23:46:58
> -0600), Zinn wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:21:06 -0400, Swampee wrote:
>>
>>> Linux simply can't perform under load and it's starts to fall apart.
>>
>> Can someone here please prove this guy wrong?
>
> It's impossible: Swampee is a troll. Its only purpose on Usenet is to get
> the attention it doesn't get elsewhere.
>
>> In particular, is a move to Fedora Core 2 likely to worsen my problems or
>> improve them?
>
> What's the problem? Performance?
>
> The (potential) problem with Fedora, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE is they
> tend to load much more software than the average user needs. This may be
> a drain on performance. OTOH, those distributions have many satisfied
> users.
>
>> What about FreeBSD?
>
> Is it a good operating system? It appears that it is.
>
> I thought about running FreeBSD about 18 months ago but it didn't support
> my serial adapter. Now it does. I might try it this summer.
>
>> I'd put Linux at or near the bottom of the pack
>
> So, you're just another troll...
>
>> as do most knowledgeable people I know who aren't on a jihad
>
> ...and one of the low-life, Microsoft sock-puppet trolls.
>
>> A PIII 866 with 384 MB ram isn't cutting edge, but it's plenty
>> good enough to run a web browser and a text editor, isn't it?
>
> It's more than enough, but possibly not enough to run GNOME or KDE.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. A quick google search yielded the two
things I've quoted at the bottom of the post, confirming that Linux
(Fedora Core 2 with GUI) has out-of-control memory requirements,
recommended at 512MB. It had not occurred to me to check the memory
requirements of a Linux system. I just assumed that 384MB would be more
than adequate for everyday tasks. I guess I'm from the old school. I
remember when people grumbled that OS/2 had 4MB minimum and 8MB
recommended for GUI work. Here we have 512MB recommended. That's
outrageous. Utterly outrageous. Does anyone know what in the heck
Linux/Gnome does with 512MB of memory? I see some icons and menus on my
screen.

One of the quotes I found was from Slashdot from just last Thursday!
No doubt all Linux advocates here will see this as a troll. So be it.
While you're at it, go harass Slashdot for running Microsoft FUD.
Maybe I just got my check straight from Bill Gates this morning. Still,
even if I'm a troll, and Slashdot has been taken over by Microsoft,
Fedora still needs 512 MB recommended ram, and that's still outrageous.
I'm surprised the Windows advocates didn't pick up on this immediately. I
guess they're not doing their homework.

Looks like I'm either going to have to chuck Gnome, or throw more
hardware at this sucker.

Case closed.






From the Fedora Core 2 page:
----------------
Memory Requirements
This section lists the memory required to install Fedora Core 2.
Minimum for text-mode: 128MB
Minimum for graphical: 256MB
Recommended for graphical: 512MB
----------------

From Slashdot:
----------------
Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower?

Posted by michael on Thursday June 10, @10:05AM
from the atkins-diet dept.
Johan Schinberg writes "Bob Marr wrote an interesting editorial about what
many of us have have noticed lately: the three most popular Linux distros
are getting "fatter" in terms of their memory footprint and CPU demands
for their graphical desktops. Fedora Core 2 isn't usable below 192 MBs of
RAM while Mandrake and SuSE aren't very far off similar requirements
either. There was a time when Linux users would brag that their favorite
OS was far less demanding that Windows, but this doesn't seem to be the
case anymore. Modern distros that use the latest versions of KDE and
(especially) Gnome feel considerably heavier than before or even than
Windows XP/2k3. Sure, Longhorn has higher requirements than XP (256 MB
RAM, 800 MHz CPU) and the final version will undoubtly be much more
demanding, but that's in 2-3 years from now. For the time being, I am
settled with XFce on my Gentoo but I always welcome more carefully-written
code."

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:49:47 -0600, Hamilcar Barca wrote:


> It's impossible: Swampee is a troll. Its only purpose on Usenet is to get
> the attention it doesn't get elsewhere.

But yet not a single one of you linux lunatics has been able to help this
guy with the exception of Nico.
That telinit trick is a keeper.
So now, why don't you try and help the bloke instead of showing him what
tried and true nutcases make their homes in COLA.
I'll even start the ball rolling.
DUMP FEDORA/REDHAT it sucks and is extremely bloated.
Try Mandrake 10 with a custom install and only install what you need.
That should speed things up.
SWAMPSTER