| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 24, 2006 23:05 UTC (Fri) by s_cargo (guest, #10473)Parent article: Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
I'm not surprised that he found Firefox and Mozilla to be so slow. I have an even older box that has Netscape 4.74 and 7.2 on it. NS 4.74 is crisp and quick while NS 7.2 is a barely usable slow pig.
If I point both browsers to the same web page and try to save anything from the page (an image or the page itself) 4.74 blows 7.2 out of the water. When I save something from 4.74, the file selection window pops up, I click save, then the download progress window quickly pops up then closes, and the image/page has been saved in the wink of an eye. When I try the same thing with NS 7.2 it takes several seconds for the file selection window to appear, then after clicking to save the file it is 15-20 seconds before the progress window appears. That's no typo; 15-20 *seconds*. It is absurd that it takes so long to manage that window.
It gets even more ridiculous when clicking on a link to a PDF file. In NS 7.2, the PDF file is often finished downloading and I'm already *reading* it in Acrobat Reader when the stupid NS 7.2 download progress window finally appears. Yup, it often takes less time to download the file, start up acroread, and display the PDF file, than it takes for NS 7.2 to put up the download progress window.
On newer and faster machines, you wouldn't notice how badly the newer version performs, but the older hardware makes it glaringly obvious.
(Log in to post comments)
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 25, 2006 2:29 UTC (Sat) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]
I've noticed the same things. I used to use a 386/33 with 32 megs of ram for a workstation,and it was noticeably faster doing most things than Windows had been on the same
machine. Yet supposedly that hardware is no longer adequate for performing the exact
same tasks I was doing then?
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 25, 2006 14:53 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]
that hardware is no longer adequate for performing the exact same tasks I was doing then?Nope. Not if you're willing to use the exact same software you were using then. The same old software will still run the same way on the same old hardware. It's when you want to run newer versions of things, versions that have improved in all sorts of ways (some of which you may not care about if, eg., any non-English, let alone non-Western, language is irrelevant to you; or if you never view any sites that rely upon current standard XHTML and CSS to control their layout) that you'll find they may not be a good match for your same old hardware.
Of course the problem is that you don't really want to do things exactly the same way you were doing them then. You may not care about some, or even most, of the things that have changed, but you want to use the newer versions of programs for doing the exact same tasks. But they do more than that, and of course there's a price to be paid for that.
This is nothing new. This same inflation has been going on in pretty much the same way since the days when 640KB of RAM really did seem as though it ought to be more than enough for anything you might want to do, and a 20MB hard disk was almost unthinkably vast. And that wasn't even so very long ago...
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 26, 2006 4:19 UTC (Sun) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]
I want the later versions for basically one reason - security fixes.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 27, 2006 8:38 UTC (Mon) by primorec (guest, #2740) [Link]
My company (+5000 employees) replaces every 3-4 years ALL MS WINDOWS based desktops with a new generation hardware. MS WINDOWS based desktops are mostly used by marketing, sales and management people. Why do they need 3.6GHz PC with 2GB RAM is beyond me. They run MS EXCEL + WORD + EMAIL + WEB browsing. The engineering part of the company uses RHEL 3.0 and a few SUN boxes.So, what did I accomplish ?
I've equipped, in the last 2-3 years, our lab with approx. 50-55 RH8 based workstations, which are used to run GPIB based equipment. One lab workstation was made, in average, out of two or three old and obsoleted PCs. I took hard disk + RAM from two or three PCs and assembled a third one. My initial lab workstations were based on Cyrix 187MHz CPU + 128MB RAM. They still run and do the work. Today I am putting together 400-700MHz PCs with 256-384MB RAM. All PCs run RH8 + XFCE desktop. Typical uptime is around 250-300 days. ALL workstations are connected to a LAN with one application/file server, which in the same time does NIS/YP + SAMBA. Users does not complain about the speed or about performance in general. In the last 2 years we did NOT buy a single new PC with MS WINDOWS installed and it seems that we will stay the same for the foreseeable future
SUMMARY:
- old hardware is still in use and it performs well
- solution is environment friendly
- it is very cost effective (no MS licenses, no new hardware - read management is happy)
- users are happy (aka they do not complain)
- users can do lab measurements from their offices (or even from home) very easily (VPN, ssh, VNC)
- geeknes factor
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Mar 4, 2006 21:35 UTC (Sat) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]
Try running a terminal server with 4 users running flash games, then you will now why they need that much CPU.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 25, 2006 2:34 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
XUL is, no doubt about it, a relatively heavy solution to the cross platform gui problem. That's where you're seeing your time go. Personally, I'm not a fan.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 25, 2006 6:20 UTC (Sat) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]
If it's the XUL interface then I'd expect, for instance, Galeon, would be much faster. I haven'ttried it in some time, but last I checked it wasn't.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 26, 2006 18:17 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
That it does not have one specific performance problem does not mean that it has no others.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Feb 28, 2006 3:48 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]
Gecko has some pretty big issues with how it stores image data: storing images decompressed in memory, storing some images on both the client and server, etc.
This is one of the reasons that having a large amount of memory improves Firefox's performance. It also points out a good place to focus efforts in reducing memory usage.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Posted Mar 1, 2006 18:38 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
If the difference is that large, I think you just have too little memoryso that the machine needs to swap and page memory pages all the time.