[SOLVED] slow imac


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Thread: [SOLVED] slow imac

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ, USA
    Posts
    287

    [SOLVED] slow imac

    greetings fellow linux followers. i come to you, yet again for consideration of an issue:

    i've got a first generation iMac -- bondi blue with G3 processor at 233 MHz w/ 256 meg RAM. i've gone from using yellowdog to debian ppc to fedora core 4 ppc all in the search for a light enough distro that will run fast enough on this relic.

    but they ALL run VEEEEEEERY slowly on the machine no matter what windows manager i use. other than manually killing processes everytime i start the machine; is there another way to get this machine to move at a decent clip?
    BEHOLD!!! MY AWESOME HUMILITY!
    Ex Linux, Scientia

    i use:
    centos 5.2 on 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 (filer/print server)
    ubuntu 8.10 on 1.6 GHz Celeron M (personal laptop)

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Sep 1999
    Posts
    3,202
    More RAM or more swap? I've got one of the old imacs wtih dvd drive, similar to yours only at 300mhz IIRC and 384mb ram. Does fine for my server needs, does remote X ok over a lan.

    edit - runing debian sarge
    Last edited by ph34r; 07-25-2005 at 01:21 PM.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ, USA
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    287
    D'OH!!!

    why didn't i think more swap space ?!!!

    ... then again, i've only got a 4 gig hard drive so space is kinda at a premium.
    BEHOLD!!! MY AWESOME HUMILITY!
    Ex Linux, Scientia

    i use:
    centos 5.2 on 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 (filer/print server)
    ubuntu 8.10 on 1.6 GHz Celeron M (personal laptop)

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    Illinois
    Posts
    3,281
    yep, links, naim, irssi.... uninstall X

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Seattle, WA USA
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    Though I didnt have much luck with it, and preferred Debian on my old slow PPC, perhaps Gentoo PPC will give you some extra speed as well.
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Oct 2000
    Location
    Calgary, Alberta, Canada
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    Lightbulb

    i doubt it. gentoo is not for speed, it is for customization. the speed thing is a fallacy with gentoo although, i do recommend trying a different kernel patch set than the standard debian one. debian tends to be more stable as opposed to speedy with their kernel. it is likely to do with kernel process scheduling and or i/o elevators. the amount of ram you have also is kind of lame -- especially for a desktop/responsive system... consider upping it to 500 MB or even better 1 GB.

    you also may want to check out the hdparm utility... by default many distributions set hard disk performance very low to increase compatibility.

    upping the swap won't make much if at all of a difference... you want to avoid swapping to disk and therefore more ram will help more. it is when apps get swapped to disk that the os tends to bog down especially when used as a desktop system as opposed to a server. X == a RAM hog as well as Gnome and Kde.
    Last edited by Hayl; 07-25-2005 at 02:43 PM.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ, USA
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    287
    you people rock!!!

    increasing the swap space helped quite a bit; but it was still a little slow. so i changed hdparm settings by
    Code:
    hdparm -c3 -u1 -a64 -k1 /dev/hda
    and that helped quite a bit too.

    i sure wish i could also increase the ram; but it's already maxed out at 256 megs of ram (according to its documentation). but that's okay... it runs fast enough now.
    BEHOLD!!! MY AWESOME HUMILITY!
    Ex Linux, Scientia

    i use:
    centos 5.2 on 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 (filer/print server)
    ubuntu 8.10 on 1.6 GHz Celeron M (personal laptop)

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    4

    Exclamation Don't Run Services You Don't Need

    Advising people to buy more RAM is the wrong way to approach a slow system. The first thing is to figure out what is slowing the system down.

    What is the output of top? What services are running in the background?

    Don't buy RAM if your system is running crud you never use. Go through your startup scripts and disable all the junk you don't need. If you are a new user and the scripts are too complicated, simply uninstall the services you don't use.

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