I mentioned in an earlier post my move from a P!! igig PC to a new dell laptop with a P4 1.6 gig and how with rh7.3 it seemed slower than the old system. I have now investigated this a little further.
I installed rh7.2 becuase I suspected KDE3 was slowing things down but although the slimmer KDE2 is a little faster it is still nowhere near as responsive as the old system. So I have played around a bit with hdparm to see if hard drive performance is a factor. hdparm reports a cache speed of over 200MBytes/sec (basically the memeory bus speed) but the cached disk read speed is a mere 3MBytes/sec. dma is not enebaled by default but if i use hdparm to enable it, cached disk read speed jumps to over 20Mbytes/sec. Set like this, applications load about twice as fast.
Then I tried all the PIO modes but this mad eno difference. So I started to set dma modes, starting from 0, but this froze the system and forced me to hard reset. So my questions are:
1. How well should a basic install be able to automagically select good disk drive parameters
2. Where are these stored and actioned?
3. How do I find the best settings for my drive other then very tedious trial and arror?
Thanks
ian
On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 10:44:33PM +0100, Ian Bell wrote:
I mentioned in an earlier post my move from a P!! igig PC to a new dell laptop with a P4 1.6 gig and how with rh7.3 it seemed slower than the old system. I have now investigated this a little further.
One other factor here i think you are saying a PIII 1Ghz to a PIV 1.6Ghz? in which case the performance would not be 60% greater, in all likelyhood a PIV at 1.6ghz will most likely be the same speed as a PIII 1Ghz for most of the time, slower for some things and faster on a very few others.
Have you also checked memory timings in the Bios? is the kernel built with support for a PIV, are you using a framebuffer driver for X or native GFX support? Are there many unused daemons running in the background that you don't need? are all other things to check.
About hdparm, PIO modes are usually discovered by the BIOS pretty accuratly so I would leave them alone, setting DMA to 16bit or 32bit with sync is usually safe and the other options are trial and error. You could try looking on the net to find other peoples settings, linux on laptops page may be good for this (this machine is a laptop?) as would looking on the disk manufacturers webpage for specs too.
Oh and finally hdparm can destroy data on your harddisk if you go for too many settings and the disk/computer doesn't like them....
Adam
On some of the earlier laptops turning on DMA caused the cdrom drives to lockup requiring a hare reset of the machine. I this was due to slightly non standard IDE bus architecture.
I run an IBM A21M which has a PIII ant about 800MHz and now have no problems with disk access once I turned on the DMA settings.
The RedHat install by default disabled the DMA .
On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 08:51, Adam Bower wrote:
On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 10:44:33PM +0100, Ian Bell wrote:
I mentioned in an earlier post my move from a P!! igig PC to a new dell laptop with a P4 1.6 gig and how with rh7.3 it seemed slower than the old system. I have now investigated this a little further.
One other factor here i think you are saying a PIII 1Ghz to a PIV 1.6Ghz? in which case the performance would not be 60% greater, in all likelyhood a PIV at 1.6ghz will most likely be the same speed as a PIII 1Ghz for most of the time, slower for some things and faster on a very few others.
Have you also checked memory timings in the Bios? is the kernel built with support for a PIV, are you using a framebuffer driver for X or native GFX support? Are there many unused daemons running in the background that you don't need? are all other things to check.
About hdparm, PIO modes are usually discovered by the BIOS pretty accuratly so I would leave them alone, setting DMA to 16bit or 32bit with sync is usually safe and the other options are trial and error. You could try looking on the net to find other peoples settings, linux on laptops page may be good for this (this machine is a laptop?) as would looking on the disk manufacturers webpage for specs too.
Oh and finally hdparm can destroy data on your harddisk if you go for too many settings and the disk/computer doesn't like them....
Adam
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