Record locking

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>Simon--er, no...it was Brian K. White--said:
>> 
>> Nowadays, (at least in the windows world)  it seems like every new machine
>> with specs that say it should run twice as fast as the last, actually runs
>> slower than the last. It's not just windows either. Linux distro's all tend
>> to install enough gnome or kde stuff in their default "desktop" installs to
>> bog any machine down in the finest windows tradition. Even if you "clean out
>> the crap" from your new factory windows install, or re-install fresh leaving
>> out the crap, it's still never exactly "fast" just "not as slow".
>
>I can attest to what you're saying.
>
>On -exactly- the same P166MMX/128MB with a Barracuda 2.1Gig as my linux
>drive, I just went from RH 5.2 running 2.0.36 to SuSE 9.0 running
>2.4.21-199 (which is probably equivalent to 2.4.25).

You had to do some serious trimming to get SuSE 9.0 Professional crammed
into a 2.1GB hard drive.  When we were runnin Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 with
the 2.0.36 kernels, everything fit nicely in a 1GB partition leaving room
for applictions.  Now we're doing 5.0GB for the OS, and it will probably
get larger (I don't spend a lot of time trying to trim things, preferring
to have everything I normally use available).

>BOY, did things get slower!  I used to be able to boot linux 3 times in
>the time it would take win95 to boot once.  Now, -discounting- the SCSI CCD
>tries and aborts it takes time to do on LUN 1 on each target with the newer
>version of the BusLogic driver, it takes roughly as long if not slightly
>longer to actually boot linux with the same services running as I had on RH
>5.2.  And it's not actually SuSE's fault.  The kernel just is not as fast
>as it used to be, IMHO.  I don't have extra modules loaded, either.  It's
>just plain slower.  I think the VM change between 2.2 and 2.4 may have had
>a lot to do with it.
>
>But I've definitely had that experience, as recently as last week, on
>identical hardware that never changed.
>
>And FWIW, I -liked- RH, but SuSE 9.0 blows away even the best RH dist I
>ever used, local or remote.  It's just plain put together a LOT better.
>Bill Campbell has been saying it for a while now, but after spending a
>few days enveloped in the guts of it, I have to say it's really very well
>engineered.  Even if RH reversed course tomorrow, I wouldn't look back--I
>like the SuSE that much more--and that was -before- I brought up X11.  I
>didn't bother with the KDE or GNOME bloat...just X11 with WindowMaker for
>me, which is what I was using on RH 5.2 since AfterStep became a PITA to
>configure when they changed schemes at about v1.4.

I do find it interesting that Apple's OS X has been getting faster with
each new release while adding new features such as expose.  Panther is
considerably faster than the first version of OS X I used about two years
ago on the same machine, a 450MhZ G4.

Bill
--
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