So performance wise how big of an upgrade is F17?

[sm222]

I'm on F16 now and it's not even that I hate Gnome 3, I actually like it but the particular machine I installed it on it runs fine until you open firefox, then it just lags like mad, XFCE runs really well but I'm thinking I don't have enough ram.

It has an nvidia graphics chip and a AMD Athlon 3800 or something like that, I can't check because I'm at work.

Sorry if this is in the wrong section but I'm not really looking for tech support, but rather what people have to say about Gnome 3's performance and the direction it's heading in.

[stevea]

Take a look at your memory usage. The commands 'free' and 'htop' are useful for this.

Firefox is not too slow, but it is a huge memory hog, so I think it's quite likely that you are correct - you need more memory to avoid swapping. FFox can eat up ~500MB of resident memory without doing anything exotic. Google chrome browser seems a lot lighter in resident memory use (I've got ~3 tabs using only , but I really miss the FF bookmark layout.

This command will help find the resident memory pigs,

ps -eo rss,cmd| cut -b1-80 | sort -n

This command, executed as root, will delete the page and inode caches, and make the memory usage reported by 'free' more closely aligned to the minimum requirements,
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

[root@hypoxylon stevea]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       7915604    7586592     329012          0    2303196    3014924
-/+ buffers/cache:    2268472    5647132
Swap:      8925180      10560    8914620
[root@hypoxylon stevea]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
[root@hypoxylon stevea]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       7915604    1199488    6716116          0       1464     156780
-/+ buffers/cache:    1041244    6874360
Swap:      8925180      10560    8914620

So the way I'm using that system at the moment, I need 1.19GB + a trivial 0.01GB in swap.
If you load up your system, drop the caches and add the used used-mem + used-swap that should give you an idea of the minimum DRAM you should be looking for. I'd shoot for at least 1.5x that amount of DRAM , tho' at todays dram pricing 2x is quite practical.


Also look at those memory hog applications and see if they can't be replaced with lighter weight alternatives.

---------- Post added at 10:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:43 AM ----------

Oh - in your original question ...

a/ I don't think you have a cpu performance issues; it's more likely your system is swapping & low on memory. Swapping implies poor performance.
b/ F17 is not likely to either use a lot more memory nor have any dramatic changes in performance compared to F16. Most of the differences are feature additions & changes.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17/FeatureList

[nonamedotc]

There is very little difference in terms of performance between F16 and F17 in my experience. The one 'addition' with respect to GNOME 3.4 is that you would be able to use the full shell in a Virtualbox. Other than that, I am not seeing anything significant.

As stevea has pointed out, this is what is expected anyway ...

[hadrons123]

shut down is fast!

Firefox has turned a pig( i know its not fedora's fault), don't know why. But I can't use chrome, becoz the addons are not as good enough as firefox.

[marko]

In my experiments, firefox uses less or similar memory than chromium. If I load Firefox with eight tab pages and chromium with the exact same tabs and then add up all the RSS values for the chromium processes (chromium makes a process per tab) and the Firefox process (one process with one thread per tab) they're similar or Firefox is less. People frequently get this wrong because the system activity panel doesn't add up the memory clearly in the chromium case (in KDE you can do Cntrl+Esc, then select "All processes, tree" view, then at least the processes for chromium are all shown in one place so you see the RSS values and add them)

[DBelton]

In my experiences here, there is a little improvement in systemd performance in F17 over F16. Other than that, there really isn't too much of a gain going to F17 performance-wise.

For most tasks, you won't notice an improvement. Mainly boot and shutdown, which won't affect you much at all. 5-10 seconds on bootup, 5-10 seconds on shutdown, and actually using your system about the same.

[hadrons123]

SystemD is getting better with each release. Cant really appreciate much in boot . Wish we could optimize as much as the recent Lennart's blog post.http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software.../Optimizations

[deanej]

Originally Posted by marko

In my experiments, firefox uses less or similar memory than chromium. If I load Firefox with eight tab pages and chromium with the exact same tabs and then add up all the RSS values for the chromium processes (chromium makes a process per tab) and the Firefox process (one process with one thread per tab) they're similar or Firefox is less. People frequently get this wrong because the system activity panel doesn't add up the memory clearly in the chromium case (in KDE you can do Cntrl+Esc, then select "All processes, tree" view, then at least the processes for chromium are all shown in one place so you see the RSS values and add them)

Then why does Firefox run so much slower, even without addons?

[ElderSnake]

I've always thought Chrome used more memory than Firefox too but on my netbook...Chrome/Chromium is definitely lighter weight.

Firefox makes this thing chugg even without doing much but Chrome, despite how much it likes memory, doesn't. And I wonder if Chrome is smarter about memory usage though, as it never seems to push my machine to Swapping, whereas Firefox has.

But on a machine with plenty of RAM it seems Chrome can use more active memory than Firefox. Does this make sense? I'm thinking Chrome, like Linux in general, will happily help itself to more memory the more that is available but can be conservative on more limited hardware..

[marko]

Originally Posted by ElderSnake

I've always thought Chrome used more memory than Firefox too but on my netbook...Chrome/Chromium is definitely lighter weight.

Firefox makes this thing chugg even without doing much but Chrome, despite how much it likes memory, doesn't. And I wonder if Chrome is smarter about memory usage though, as it never seems to push my machine to Swapping, whereas Firefox has.

But on a machine with plenty of RAM it seems Chrome can use more active memory than Firefox. Does this make sense? I'm thinking Chrome, like Linux in general, will happily help itself to more memory the more that is available but can be conservative on more limited hardware..

That's called good engineering design, if you have RAM, then it makes sense to use it all. The kernel will decommit cached and buffered ram when an app needs it so fast that there's not much benefit to actually leaving it unused.