Kernel Summit: Desktop performance [LWN.net]

Kernel Summit: Desktop performance

Posted Jul 23, 2004 19:58 UTC (Fri) by socket (guest, #43)
In reply to: Kernel Summit: Desktop performance by Ross
Parent article: Kernel Summit: Desktop performance

I must say, I'm impressed. My father's XP system is a decent 1.5 Ghz Athlon, a quarter gig of memory, and plenty of hard drive space. It takes 3 minutes from the time you hit the power button to the time you can log in. Once you're logged in, it takes another 7 or 8 *minutes* for the system to actually be in a usable state. He regularly turns on his computer, starts making coffee, logs in, and then finishes making his coffee before going back to his computer.

XP has the annoying feature that if you do something like click on the start menu while things are still being run out of the startup folder, the menu will randomly go away while the other program runs. It's as though these services require you to not be using anything while they're starting up, which suggests to me that they really should be started *before* the login screen comes up. Eh. Windows.

Perhaps this is an unusual case, but my girlfriend's mother's XP system does the same thing. Meanwhile, both my laptop and my desktop running SuSE 9.1 come up from a cold boot in under a minute and a half. I login, and WindowMaker comes up in about 2 seconds, Konsole in about 10, Emacs in 8, and Mozilla in about 20. Once the libraries are loaded, new instances are a lot snappier.

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Kernel Summit: Desktop performance

Posted Aug 2, 2004 5:58 UTC (Mon) by goaty (guest, #17783) [Link]

My father's XP system is a decent 1.5 Ghz Athlon, a quarter gig of memory, and plenty of hard drive space.

There's your problem right there. XP doesn't fit in 256Mb. It's slow because it's swapping.

I personally think XP starts up amazingly quickly, given its gargantuan girth. I've sometimes wondered if Microsoft weren't doing horrible hacks like copying some DLLs straight into the page file, but surely even they wouldn't sink that low!

I too have played "Start Menu Roulette" on many an occasion. You've got to give Microsoft their props. The XP Start Menu is the only GUI widget that makes me laugh on a regular basis.