Why is Mandrake so slow?

[hop-frog]

I have a slow machine so it is easy to count the seconds between programs opening. Based on my observations, Mandrake 10 must be 20 times slower than SuSE 9.1. Mandrake has always been one of the bulkier distros, but this is simply ridiculous.

- I clicked on OpenOffice.org. It didn't open. Perhaps 10 minutes later, the OOo splash screen appeared.

- I opened rxvt, which takes 2-3 seconds to appear on SuSE. This took 30 seconds, and then when it did open, there was another 10 second wait before the bash prompt loaded.

- Mozilla didn't even bother to load.

- I went into the Mandrake Control Center and I turned off all but a few of the services and rebooted the computer. While it booted faster, there was no apparent change.

What is going on?

[Legithrandil]

well, first off, what window manager are you running?

also how many procs are you running? (try "ps -e | wc -l" and subtract 1 from the result)

also, did you compile a custom kernel for your suse installation and if so, are you using one for your mandrake install?

[cybertron]

Something is flat out wrong if it's taking that long to load things on anything other than about a Pentium 1 or maybe 2. Have you tried running "top" to see if something is hogging CPU time? That's about all I can think of.

[Loki3]

My guess is you have some process that failed on bootup eating up all your system resources. I ran Mandrake 10 on a 400Mhz/256mb machine without too much trouble. Open Office took about five seconds to load, Mozilla about three and KDE was sluggish sometimes. Other than that things ran fine.

Try top as suggested earlier.

[hop-frog]

I don't have the machine installed now, it was too much of a pain to use. Also, I couldn't get Mozilla to run, so I was without an internet connection. If someone things they have a good solution though, I would be willing to give it a try and reinstall. Currently I am stuck with SuSE 9.1 Personal Edition, which does not have a great package selection.

I did try 'top', but as I don't know what any of the numbers mean. I did not try killing anything because the X was on the first application on the list. The list was about 2 screens long, and I had to use ALT+Drag to see them all, but most of the items in the bottom half of the list had 0's next to them.

what window manager are you running? I was running IceWM in Mandrake and KDE in SuSE.

also, did you compile a custom kernel for your suse installation and if so, are you using one for your mandrake install?Nope, these were installed by default.

[Dark Ninja]

Two screens worth of top items?! Daaaaaaaang.

I have to ask the folks at JL. Is this normal? When I use the 'top' command (at bootup) I have no more than...maybe...10-15 processes running. (That's total.) And none of them are using any CPU resources.

:: sigh ::
I love Gentoo.

[cybertron]

Dark Ninja: Really? Mine only displays about 15 items, but there are a lot more that don't fit on the screen. What number does "ps aux | wc -l" give you?

Even on Mandrake most of my processes don't use any CPU and that's including a number of unnecessary eye candy apps:)

[eisman]

There should really be something that eats up you processing time. What is the status of your network card?
look in the /etc/hosts file if this is configurate correctly, this can " hang-up" the system for awhile.

The system is looking again and again, and this takes up time. It is a commen problem with mandrake and if you have the /etc/hosts file correct it works. Perhaps this might be a problem on your system. It was in the beta release of mandrake, but I thought it was fixed in the final 10.0!