I used to wonder why my friends always had faster speeds at LAN parties when I had the uber processor and video card at the time.

Turned out that my hard drive was going bad. Replaced the hard drive and my system was running as fast as it should have...only by the time I figured it out, my machine wasn''t the uber machine anymore. B-)


When I installed Gnu/Linux on my machine, I wondered why it was that my mp3s and games would play sound so choppy. I thought maybe it was just KDE 2, which was really slow in general.

Turned out it was the way my hard drive was configured. By default, Linux will run the hard drive at its quickest and safest...which generally means that if it doesn''t know the hard drive, the quickest would be something safe, like no DMA and other things.

hdparm -Tt /dev/hdX

Try that. It will tell you how fast your drive is.

When I applied the hdparm settings I found on the net about my drive, I went from 1-2MBps to 64-74MBps. I didn''t want to try to get it faster, even though I could. I wasn''t actually aware at the time of what I could apply as I wasn''t familiar with my drive. Applying settings that the drive can''t handle makes it unstable. You''ll lose data. I was satisfied with the jump I was able to manage, but I could find more info or experiment if I was brave.

Seconds to boot a program? A KDE app at that? That isn''t bad at all. But the post about dependencies is right on. Generally, Linux/UNIX apps might need to use multiple libraries for different things. Some apps will have statically linked libraries which makes them faster, but also makes them harder to upgrade (replacing the entire app rather than a library it depends on, for instance).

Of course, if you are using a lot of apps that share the same library, the speed will appear to improve. Opening the first app will cause the library to be loaded, and opening subsequent apps will simply use the already loaded library. The subsequent apps will appear to load faster when in actuality, they just had to load less from the hard drive. This should be the case with KDE and the "k" apps.

I have a computer with similar specs (only 1.3MHz and only 256 Mb ram) and most programs load in about 4 seconds, OpenOffice.org takes 6 seconds, and that''s considerably faster than most Windows2000 applications on the exact same computer.

Wow, K-Office loaded in 5-8 seconds on my P3 650 mhz 128 mb of pc100 sdram desktop. O_o...

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Fatal Frog Entertainment (FFE): My solo company in progress.

Ok, I guess the 4-7s wait is normal then, that''s good. As I understand it... the fact that I have a fast processor and high RAM doesn''t affect load times, since it is limited by the speed of my HDD when loading all the libraries it uses. I was just curious what else I could do to tinker with the drive under FreeBSD, since I''ve heard many linux fanatics boast about how their linux setup was faster than their windows setup (which is sorta true in my case, except for loading programs, my FreeBSD setup seems faster).

Also, FreeBSD has no "hdparm" program to test how fast my data transfer is actually going, and I would really like to be able to do this.. any FreeBSD experts know of any way for me to test the speed of my HDD? I can''t seem to find this info anywhere.