Re: SEUL: About friendlyness

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

> 
> jfm2@club-internet.fr wrote:
> 
> > > Linus uses RedHat because he is lazy and Alan Cox dose because he works
> > > for them.
> > >
> > > Just to preempt any rebuttals :)
> > >
> > 
> > Alan was using RedHat well before they employed him.  Top kernel
> > developpers left Slackware more than two years ago.  While some can
> > have left RedHat either for ideological sympathy to Debian or due to
> > RedHat poor quality control in its two last distributions the fact is
> > telling "advanced" people use difficult distributions is a fallacy.
> > Real top guns are too busy doing real work like kernel hacking and
> > have no time to lose in things like hand customizing a raw X desktop
> > or editing config files in order to ensure a daemon is started at
> > boot.
> > 
> > One of the problems for making Linux user friendly is the
> > "hackeristic" aura.  We have to dispel it and one of the things we
> > have to learn is lose respect to people who use difficult software for
> > the sake of it.
> > 
> > Tonight I will publish in Independence a quantified evaluation of the
> > benefits of kernel recompiling.  They are close to nil if the kernel
> > was half decently compiled.  In particular the fact of compiling for
> > Pentium instead of 386 improves performance of the C parts by less
> > than 2%.  Yes two.  And this is still smaller if we take the overall
> > performance of the whole kernel, and still smaller if you count for
> > time spent in user mode to get the overall system performance.
> > 
> > That is for the kernel compiling myth.
>  
> I just installed Slackware ( same machine, slower drive ) and somehow 
> it feels faster than RedHat.  There are many many things I don't yet
> know how to do under Slackware ( RedHat has it beat on ease of use ) 
> but it really dose seam significantly faster even though both use the
> same Kernel, EGCS, and GlibC.
> 
> Any ideas on how this happens ?  It really would be cool if we could
> make
> independence faster than RedHat.  
> 
> PS : If it's just that Slackware is loading less daemons then we need 
> to not load some of those RedHat is loading.  For our target audience 
> there needs to be only a few daemons running.
> 
> INN ( or some other news server thingy )
> Sendmail ( or some other MTA )
> httpd ( newbies will want a home web server even if they use it alone )
> lpd ( we all print sometime )
> 
> Beyond that it's basically just whatever is needed to keep the system 
> alive.  Or am I reading the bloat wrong ?
> 


I cannot tell you if don't give more details: How much more memory do
you have?  Were you using X?  What was the program who felt slow?
Is your box swapping?


In low mem boxes RedHat will feel slower in part beacuse of PAM: it
doesn't do an exec but a fork when you login, that means 800K of shared
libs using memory until they are swapped.  That is the price of PAM.

Also AfterStep is used in RedHat 5.1 and by default it is configureed
to react with a slight delay (I deactivated this but I don't remeber
how).

If the problem seems CPU-realated then do a time on some commands.
Perhaps Pat uses agressive Gcc optimizations.

Be wary however of subjective feelings: 5.1 seemed faster than 5.0 and
I attributed that to egcs.  Then I found that in fact it was gcc who
had been used.  In addition egcs slowed FPU intensive programs when
used in the 6x86 Cyrix I was using.  I didn't tested integer prorams.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org