04-08-2015, 02:14 PM
Although I have newer machines I use, I have a couple older Pentium 4 boxes (2.66 and 2.8 Ghz, 533 bus (both), 2 Gb ram on both) that I like playing around with. I dual boot as there are some XP games that won't run on Wine. I don't go on-line with the XP side due to security concerns, etc so frequently go on-line with the Linux side.
I have tried a bunch of Distros on these machines, especially those with low system requirements. Usually these run quite well and fast until I hit the icon to pull up a browser ... then it takes forever to get a browser window open. Once open it will take forever to pull up Gmail,etc. Obviously if it's Chrome or a similar browser it is somewhat quicker the next time as it's running something in the background, but still slow.
I was recently watching the resource usage when I hit the browser icon and the CPU did not max out (pretty close though 90+%, the memory did not max out, no swap used. So, based on this I figured it's limited by bus speed or something and that's as good as it is going to get. I am always trying new Distros though, more of a hobby than anything , and last week I loaded a Debian-testing based Distro, I think it was Sparky Linux, and the browsers (relatively) screamed! I would say they came up 5X faster than on the Ubuntu releases tried, and once up loading new pages was faster! After a couple days of trouble with Sparky though I gave up. For whatever reason Debian does not seem to run well on these older boxes of mine and I getinto enless loops, can't load drivers, etc. I liked the speed though, so tried some more Debian based Distros, the last I tried was a Makulu Distro. I really liked it, but again had some issues and gave up. Then I noticed that Makulu had a Ubuntu based Distro, and figured "what the heck ..." and tried that. I seems stable, and the browsers are quite fast. I should note that most of these Distros tried (incl. Makulu) used xfce (or a similar lightweight DE if the Distro did not have xfce as an option).
So, what's the deal ... why do browsers run faster in Debian (even though I can't use them), and why are browsers running much faster on Makulu (7.1) Ubuntu based than other Ubuntu based Distros I have tried? This would lead me to believe that a lot of the speed issue I am experiencing is due to OS/software not my old hardware. What effects browser speed (way beyond my knowledge but I find it puzzling)? Anyone have and ideas, just curious more than anything?
Chris
I have tried a bunch of Distros on these machines, especially those with low system requirements. Usually these run quite well and fast until I hit the icon to pull up a browser ... then it takes forever to get a browser window open. Once open it will take forever to pull up Gmail,etc. Obviously if it's Chrome or a similar browser it is somewhat quicker the next time as it's running something in the background, but still slow.
I was recently watching the resource usage when I hit the browser icon and the CPU did not max out (pretty close though 90+%, the memory did not max out, no swap used. So, based on this I figured it's limited by bus speed or something and that's as good as it is going to get. I am always trying new Distros though, more of a hobby than anything , and last week I loaded a Debian-testing based Distro, I think it was Sparky Linux, and the browsers (relatively) screamed! I would say they came up 5X faster than on the Ubuntu releases tried, and once up loading new pages was faster! After a couple days of trouble with Sparky though I gave up. For whatever reason Debian does not seem to run well on these older boxes of mine and I getinto enless loops, can't load drivers, etc. I liked the speed though, so tried some more Debian based Distros, the last I tried was a Makulu Distro. I really liked it, but again had some issues and gave up. Then I noticed that Makulu had a Ubuntu based Distro, and figured "what the heck ..." and tried that. I seems stable, and the browsers are quite fast. I should note that most of these Distros tried (incl. Makulu) used xfce (or a similar lightweight DE if the Distro did not have xfce as an option).
So, what's the deal ... why do browsers run faster in Debian (even though I can't use them), and why are browsers running much faster on Makulu (7.1) Ubuntu based than other Ubuntu based Distros I have tried? This would lead me to believe that a lot of the speed issue I am experiencing is due to OS/software not my old hardware. What effects browser speed (way beyond my knowledge but I find it puzzling)? Anyone have and ideas, just curious more than anything?
Chris