I found this interesting message on a news group. It somewhat correlate with my observations. Linuxuser General speed issues with RedHat 8.0 versus SuSE 8.1 From:Mark Shroyer Date:Sunday 26 January 2003 02:13:31 pm Groups:alt.os.linux.redhat no references This is a very general, qualitative question, so I am not expecting a precise reply; merely some ideas will do... The one great issue that I have with Red Hat 8 is an issue of speed. I am running SuSE 8.1 and RedHat 8.0 on the same machine (A Dell Inspiron 8200, 60 GB 5200 rpm HD, DVD/CD-RW, GeForce2-Go graphics @1600x1200, Intel Pentium 4 Mobile @1.6 GHz, etc.). I am running KDE 3.0.3 on SuSE and 3.0.5a on RedHat. I have the same hdparm settings for my hard drive on both operating systems (-d1 -c3). When I play music files, I use Noatun/aRts on both operating systems. When running Red Hat 8, I notice several things: - EMACS takes long to load (~10 seconds) - Mozilla takes long to load (~20-30 seconds) - OpenOffice takes very long to load first time on boot (~1.5 min) - Any sound I'm playing through Noatun gets very choppy when I do other things with the system unless I give both Noatun and aRts a nice value of -20 - When loading large applications, such as OpenOffice or Mozilla, the OS doesn't seem to want to make use of the full extent of my system resources. Gkrellm will report only moderate CPU usage, and my hard drive access LED will light up only intermittently. On the other hand, with SuSE: - EMACS loads almost instantly - Mozilla loads very fast - OpenOffice loads fast enough (~5 seconds) - Sound through aRts / Noatun is not choppy at all, even with a nice of 0. Additionally, hdparm -t /dev/hda under Red Hat 8 shows about 15 MB/s, whereas under SuSE it consistently shows around 20 MB/s (This wouldn't have anything to do with where I have each distribution physically located on the hard drive, would it? Or that I have Red Hat on a primary partition while SuSE is on an extended one?) Now the primary differences that I can think of between the two distributions that have any chance of causing these effects are: - SuSE appears to be compiled for i586, whereas Red Hat is for i386. - SuSE is on ReiserFS, while Red Hat is on ext3 (I thought ext3 was supposed to outperform Reiser?) - SuSE has ALSA; Red Hat doesn't. - Maybe SuSE has some kind of low-latency patch on its kernel (preempt? I don't know) - SuSE simply has good karma for being made in Germany So my question: Can you offer any ideas as to what I might be able to do to bring Red Hat's performance up to that of SuSE on my computer? I would hate to have to give up my RHN subscription and go through the bother of migrating to SuSE, but that performance gap between the two is simply outstanding, and not something I can live with. Thanks in advance, -Mark

I just bought SuSE 8.1 Pro a few days ago and I'm very satisfied with it. I almost never worked with RedHat because from what I have seen from that distr. I should really choose SuSE because there aren't any big reasons why you shouldn't :) It's fast, it's overcomplete and it just looks yummie! And Yast2 is a very handy tool for system administrators. Ofcourse everyone has it's own opinion about the different distributions available today.. I haven't used the support function from SuSE yet, so no comment on that..

I am running RedHat7.3 I hated 8.0. I now know which distro I will use next SuSe8.1 pro. In 7.3 OOo is veryslow to load and so is Mozilla and about everything else. Emacs and any other console based program on the other hand is very fast. And my system specs are 1800+ OC to 1.6 512 mb of pc 2100 ddr266 40 gig Maxtar 7200rpm Harddrive. So it is not my system it has to be RedHat Thanks Ron

mark said: "Can you offer any ideas as to what I might be able to do to bring Red Hat's performance up to that of SuSE on my computer?" i was thinking about this problem today when i 'ssh'ed into an RH8 server that i've set up and ran mozilla on it through the X server on my workstation. this server machine used to be my workstation and i remember how slow mozilla used to be even though it's a damn good machine - same kinds of times you were talking about. now the server sits, headless, in run level 3 not running any gui and mozilla over ssh is SOOO fast... i had a look at the newsgroup thread that you mention above and someone suggests that it might be something to do with RH8 X configuration. this would make sense and explain the speed up that i've experienced by running mozilla on a machine without X. it must have something to do with X throttling the applications as they start up... X doesn't seem to take processor power - or maybe it doesn't allow programmes access to resources. mark said:"When loading large applications, such as OpenOffice or Mozilla, the OS doesn't seem to want to make use of the full extent of my system resources." i find the same thing with RH8 on my workstation when running Open Office on a default set up of X. what is the difference between the RH8 default and SuSE8.1 default versions of XFree86 that could cause this loss of power in RH? that is the question..! ... i think ...

I'm using Red Hat Linux 8 and everything works fine. I have never tried SuSe just because they don't offer the ISO images. However I'm happy with Red Hat. I guess their working towards the right direction. Anyway, I'm trying Slackware 8.1 and I'm gonna install Debian 3 just for fun and learn how those distroes work. n0dez