Zenwalk vs. Salix desktop performance
Posted: 3. Mar 2012, 14:05
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?
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?