[Fwd: [Fwd: Why Red Hat Linux is slow]]

[Chuck Mead]

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- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: Why Red Hat Linux is slow
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 09:35:27 -0600
From: Tom 'spot' Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com>
Reply-To: tech-list at redhat.com
Organization: Red Hat
To: tech-list at redhat.com

A friend from one of the few remaining Red Hat friendly LUGs forwarded
me this thread, I thought it merited some technical discussion.

- -----Forwarded Message-----
Thought this might be an interesting post - thoughts?

| >Speaking of kill files, does anybody know why Red Hat 9 is so much
| > slower than previous versions?  I installed it on the beater box that I
| >  lend out and use for emergencies and it's unusable.
|
| A few reasons:
|
| - - UTF-8 by default throughout the OS, including in the boot scripts;
| this
|   means odd and/or non-optimized collation rules etc. make sure you set
| "LANG=C" instead of "LANG=en_US.utf8".
|
| - - some horrible wchar_t patches applied to various things.  The RH9
|   version of Tcl/Tk, for example, uses 4x the RAM for text areas, due to
| a patch that makes them use wchar_t instead of char.   This
| *massively* screws up most useful Tk apps, like ExMH.
|
| - - apparently, RH9 came with block cache settings that are suboptimal.
|   A thread here:
|   http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/users/2003-June/010158.html
| and elsewhere notes that this helps:
|
| 	/sbin/sysctl -w vm.bdflush="30 500 0 0 2560 15360 60 20 0"
|
|   WFM!
|
| My next install will run Debian ;) -- assuming Fedora doesn't sort it
| all out.  The UTF-8 fiasco especially pissed me off.

~spot
- ---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE
Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader

"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is
novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present
social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to
be published." -- Aldous Huxley




- --
Chuck Mead <csm at redhat.com>
Instructor II, GLS
Disclaimer: "It's Thursday and my name is Locutus of B0rk!"
Addendum: "Bwahahaha! Fire up the orbital mind-control lasers!"


- --
csm
Lunar Project Leader
Disclaimer: "I am not a curmudgeon! No... really..."
Addendum: "Bwahahaha! Fire up the orbital mind-control lasers!"
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