New installation - slow as molasses

[epp]

Hi. I installed PCBSD using the network install image. Having experience with Linux, I was expecting it to be at least as fast as Linux is on the same hardware, but unfortunately, it was far from that.

The CPU is an AMD Athlon (K7) 32-bit, 600 MHz with 512Mb (max) of RAM installed. Linux is very fast on this same hardware.

After it was installed, I installed a few other applications I am familiar with but during the installation process, I opted to install both the LXDE and XFCE desktops. Claws Mail ran fine as did Midori (which appears to be the default browser), I would not consider these two apps as having run "slow".

But Firefox was a major exception. I selected it on the desktop and three minutes later, I'm still waiting for the Firefox window to open...

When I opened a terminal window and ran "top", it indicated the entire system, including GUI, was using somewhere around 100Mb of memory, which I thought was great, given that 512Mb is installed. It was also not using any of the swap space and I did not notice anything that took the lion's share of the CPU power.

But I have no idea why it's slow, especially Firefox, when compared to Linux.

Is the particular CPU apparently one that should not be used with FreeBSD? I figured if it was more than adequate for Linux, it would be the same for FreeBSD...

Thank you in advance for any thoughts or suggestions.

[purgatori]

Did you use Firefox under Linux? Because with your system specs, I would imagine that Firefox would cause slow-down.

I'm running PCBSD on a Pentium 4 2.66ghz with 512MB RAM myself, and I use Ratpoison -- which consumes even fewer resources than LXDE or XFCE. Even so, I wouldn't dream of running Firefox without incurring a major hit to performance -- so I don't. Instead, I use Conkeror; it's still Firefox at its core, but it strips away enough of the GUI elements and cruft to make it a little less of a CPU/RAM hog.

If I weren't so enamored of Conkeror's keyboard-driven driven interface, though, I would be using Opera. Of all the fully-featured browsers (as opposed to Dillo, Surf, Links, W3M, Lynx, etc.) I have tried, it is the most resource-friendly. Also, you may want to look at what happens to your resource usage when you start using things like Flash. I know that it causes a huge spike on my system, as it's not very well optimized, and creates a lot of overhead.

[epp]

Thanks for the reply.

I have used Firefox under Linux, but I install it in my home directory since I'm the only user on the system. I get the official tarball file from Mozilla's FTP site and extract it in a sub-directory of my home/~user/ directory.

I also use the Adobe Flash Player Linux plugin with it, since there is a memory leak in gnash that, on both this same hardware and on a laptop with more than 3x the processor speed, it used over 1Gb of virtual memory on both.

I'll uninstall Firefox and see what else PCBSD has to offer. Thanks again.

[purgatori]

Thanks for the reply.

I have used Firefox under Linux, but I install it in my home directory since I'm the only user on the system. I get the official tarball file from Mozilla's FTP site and extract it in a sub-directory of my home/~user/ directory.

I also use the Adobe Flash Player Linux plugin with it, since there is a memory leak in gnash that, on both this same hardware and on a laptop with more than 3x the processor speed, it used over 1Gb of virtual memory on both.

I'll uninstall Firefox and see what else PCBSD has to offer. Thanks again.

The Adobe Flash Player plugin available for Linux distros, from my experience, seems to perform better than under PC/FreeBSD. I think this is largely due to the fact that we still have to use nspluginwrapper -- which is how it used to be on Linux before Adobe decided to provide better support. Of course, Adobe are now dropping support for Flash on Linux anyway, and so the browser of choice for Flash is probably Google Chrome. I say "probably" because I haven't tested Flash performance in recent versions of Chrome myself. It may be something worth trying if you use a lot of Flash applications, though.

[epp]

It turns out the main cause of the overall slowness, was the monitor resolution. From the desktop (XFCE), it only offered 1280x1024 (24-bit color) and 640x480.

The video card is an older 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 (PCI). I knew it had more resolutions than two, so I ran the Display settings from the PC-BSD Control Panel, discovered that the system reboots then goes into the X configuration, where I was able to select 1024x768 (16-bit color).

Upon the system coming back up, it's noticably faster now and in checking Firefox after I reinstalled it, it is still slower than Midori, but it now runs somewhat faster than it did before. I am using LXDE on this session and using Firefox to post this message.

It looks like I will probably keep PC-BSD installed on this, as I have discovered that version 3 of the Linux kernel will not boot on this hardware (tried Vector Linux and Debian testing (Wheezy)).

[epp]

This was definitely a monitor resolution issue. With a 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI card installed, it defaulted to 1024x768 and it now runs faster.

I am going to try it with a nVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 PCI card as I have noticed when using the 3dfx, the application menus display in different colored hues (three) for the background, but this only occurs with menu listings, not anything else.

[david_a]

This was definitely a monitor resolution issue. With a 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI card installed, it defaulted to 1024x768 and it now runs faster.

I am going to try it with a nVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 PCI card as I have noticed when using the 3dfx, the application menus display in different colored hues (three) for the background, but this only occurs with menu listings, not anything else.

Go into the system settings for Xfce (I forget the exact name, but the main preferences for Xfce anyway), then go to "Window Manager Tweaks", and make sure all the fancy features - especially compositing - are turned off. Compositing and other window manager tweaks will really slow down your system.

[epp]

I use LXDE as the default desktop. The system as a whole, runs faster using LXDE, versus XFCE or KDE, both of which are also installed.

I'm testing out the nVIDIA card now. When I ran the Display Manager after installing it, the defaults showing were correct, except for the driver. It defaulted to an ATI driver. I changed this to 'nv' and everything then came up perfectly, it also eliminated the tri-color menu backgrounds.

Since the 'tdfx' driver wasn't listed in the pull down list in the Display Manager (not sure if it's included with the distro), I have no idea what X was using for a driver with the 3dfx card.

Another problem solved.

[david_a]

I use LXDE as the default desktop.

Sorry I didn't read properly.