poor performance on fresh install

[jason.elliot]

I just installed Fedora Core 2 on a new Acer Ferrari 3200 laptop. The laptop has a Mobile AMD Athalon 64 processor, so I installed the x86-64 version. Everything runs VERY slowly, and the boot and login are VERY slow, too. Top and the system monitor show that memory usage is not too high, but cpu usage is consistently at or near 100%. Also, I just found out that my battery life is suffering from this (as one would expect). Any input would be very much appreciated!

Sincerely,
Jason

[jcstille]

Try checking performance with a smaller window manager. I know Icewm is popular (I have used it a couple times and is very quick, try that)

[superbnerd]

You should use the top command to find which program is eating your resources. At the command line top

[jason.elliot]

Here is what top says: X is using about 7% of the cpu, until I move something, then it jumps up to anywhere from 40% to 80%, and metacity shows as using about 10%. This happens even when I just move the mouse. Occasionally, mrtg breifly uses about 85% of the cpu, even though I'm not purposefully running mrtg.

I'm looking into icewm. Also, I'm going to reboot into runlevel 3 and check things out.

Thanks!

Jason

[imdeemvp]

you did not mention your ram....i have a laptop too and for it to run smoothly it has 512mb of ram...and you?

[superbnerd]

Also, what is your video card?

[jason.elliot]

Ram is 512M with 2G of swap. I don't think that memory is the problem: system monitor showed only about 30% of the memory being used, and none of the swap.

The video card is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 128M of memory. I'm thinking that the problem has to do with video, because the cpu usage seemed to jump when something in the display changed. Also, I'm now running in runlevel 3 (text mode, i.e., without X) and top reports that top is using the most %cpu, which averages about 3% or 4%. This is good. Now, if I could only get that to happen while I'm running X...

Thanks again!

Jason

[binary]

Did you check out if DMA is turned on for your hard disk? Especially with S-ATA controllers it may happen to be turned off by default. This may cause severe performace issues.