i have two hard disks(hda and hdc) of sizes 20GB and 80 GB respectively, with a P3 processor.
I have installed RHEL-5 server on this machine, with /boot=1GB(on hda) and swap= 1GB, /=20GB (on hdc). but the system runs very slow.

can anybody tell how to make it faster?

That is a very Old OS, the newer linux distros are much faster. Id suggest trying a free version of redhat like fedora or centos for the server end

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Disregard AhronZombi's comment

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 is not old. It came out sometime in 2007 I believe. Now if he had said "RH" 5 and not "RHEL" I would agree.

The problem is the very limited spec system you are running it on.

Some of the ways of making it faster (without putting it on a more robust system) are:

Add more RAM

Install a faster CPU

Turn off unnecessary services

Install a Linux video driver from your video card manufacturer (vice using the ones built into Linux) nvidia chipset video cards imo have the best support and a good universal linux driver available for download.

Run in init state 3 (no graphical interface)

I deal with RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 at work, all the time. I would never try to run them on a 386 system.

Linux is for most people slow.

Big bloated OS's like RH are known to be resource hogs and you don't have any to spare.

Consider a ligher distro, or at least a faster windows manager. Consider installing a more streamlined OS's. RH may be starting all sorts of services and protection.

Consider puppy or dsl or even the best would be to build a gentoo system just for your machine.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

I agree with Jefro. I've tried quite a few distros now and even the fastest ones have been slower than Windows XP was on the exact same machine. Just booting up the kernel takes longer than XP did and programs take much longer to load as well, especially Firefox. Yikes! I'm not complaining of course, I'm a Slacker for life. But people often assume Linux is going to be faster than Windows. It is not. At least not in my experience.

Slacker... and lovin it.

Latest Distro usually used latest hardware spec & software packages during compilation which intend to use with new generation of hardware base on the beta version time. RHEL 5 were release during Pentium 4 & Pentium Dual time. I recommend that you used RHEL 3 or mostly RHEL 4 on Pentium III unless few step taken -
1. Only install the package that you need
2. No memory intensive application like X-Win. Thus start at init 3 not 5.
3. Re-Compile Kernel into hardware type that most near or prefer as the installed machine.

My Email Server are using Pentium III with only SMTP/SSH/Webmin/HTTP related packages installed. Kernel have been re-compiled. Its fast.