Zenwalk vs. Salix desktop performance

[GJones]

One of the few things I've been less than enamored with about my experience with Salix is the performance. On my laptop, a fairly powerful 64-bit machine, it works fine. But on my puny little netbook... Not so much. The problem basically boils down to Firefox and other applications freezing momentarily when stuff is going on in the background - not just heavy CPU or hard drive activity, but simple stuff like files downloading. Also, network access suffers greatly during downloads - one process seems to get permission to hog all available bandwidth. Between those and slow application start times, the netbook gets annoying to use.

So this morning I took the time to try Zenwalk 7 again on the netbook. It may be pretty buggy, but I remembered it being a lot faster...

Because it is! The problems I mentioned are much less severe on Zenwalk. The lack of network bandwidth hogging is especially obvious. There are several reasons I can think of for this, which might contribute or might not.

Zenwalk uses a fully preemptible kernel which is supposed to increase desktop performance. However, my experience is that preemptible custom kernels on Salix don't make a noticeable difference.

Zenwalk uses Colivas' BFS CPU scheduler. This might make a difference I guess.

Zenwalk sets swappiness to 10 by default. But doing this on Salix makes no difference.

Zenwalk uses Xfce 4.8. This means no HAL (so less polling). Also maybe Xfwm4 has some new optimizations?

And as far as I know, all those still leave the network bandwidth thing unexplained.

I'd like to figure out why it is that Zenwalk flies on this machine and Salix doesn't... Because Salix is much better maintained in my experience. Any ideas? Should I maybe post the kernel config?

[thenktor]

If you think the kernel makes the difference just boot Salix with the Zenwalk kernel and give it a try You can also try the LXDE version if you think Xfce 4.6 is the problem. And change your browser, Firefox starts very slow. I'd suggest Google Chrome or Midori.

[Shador]

If you think the kernel makes the difference just boot Salix with the Zenwalk kernel and give it a try

You should have the kernel modules installed too. Otherwise it might give your a hard time.

[ikke]

So this morning I took the time to try Zenwalk 7 again on the netbook. It may be pretty buggy, but I remembered it being a lot faster...

Can you explain why you feel Zenwalk is "pretty buggy". What are those bugs?

Thank you.

[thenktor]

If you think the kernel makes the difference just boot Salix with the Zenwalk kernel and give it a try

You should have the kernel modules installed too. Otherwise it might give your a hard time.

This should be obvious

[GJones]

Can you explain why you feel Zenwalk is "pretty buggy". What are those bugs?

Thank you.

For starters, many, many GTK applications in the "extra" repo cannot save their preferences. Change settings, close, open, the settings are back where they started.

(IIRC I reported this, and discovered that most of the "extra" packages are unmaintained due to lack of developers.)

[GJones]

Hmm... Zenwalk's kernel seems to be compiled with no IPv6 support whatsoever. Not necessarily a good thing, that, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the bandwidth hogging thing (or, on Zenwalk, lack thereof). Maybe there's some kind of bug involved?

[JRD]

Very interresting. Yes, please post the kernel config (in a pastebin site). I would be interrested to look for this.
Maybe Zenwalk use a more recent version of the kernel too...and so of the drivers. Drivers are the most updated things between each kernel version, so maybe a bug in the network driver has been corrected in a more recent kernel version.

[GJones]

Zenwalk actually uses an older kernel - 2.6.37.4, as opposed to 2.6.37.6.

Anyway, here is the config:

http://pastebin.com/E82WzZVb

Note that it will disappear in a month.

[gapan]

If there is any difference, I think it can only be the BFS scheduler. Try building a kernel with the BFS patches by ckolivas. I'm betting it would make a lot of difference in a netbook. Or like others suggested, try the kernel packages from zenwalk.