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**tiger99** · Jan 01, 2007, 08:00 PM

Re: XGL-Beryl Ran Smoother Before

Your xorg.conf looks OK to me, and I have installed Nvidia drivers many times, on many different distros, so I am at least slightly familiar with what to look for. Certainly, by using "nvidia" rather than "nv" driver, as you have, the card's 3D acceleration will be working. But if you look on the Nvidia web site, there is somewhere a quite long text file which shows some more options that you can set. However, for now, I would suggest looking elsewhere for the problem. By the way, you can blow away the three entries relating to Wacom stuff, unless you are using such a thing. They seem to get installed by default on Kubuntu, but I have never seen them on SuSE. However, they are harmless, as far as I can see, and the machine I am on right now has them installed.

Now let us go over what you did, thay might have resulted in a change...... (yes, you probably had very good reasons to reformat etc, but obviously that is likely to be related to the problem somehow.)

Firstly, you reformatted your hard drive. Have you changed the partition layout? Where you put the swap partition matters very much, unless you have a vast amount of RAM, and so minimum swapping. Depending on how many partitions you are using (anything from a single root partition to separate /home, /bin, /etc, /usr, /etc, /tmp.......), and how you use the machine, the group of tracks with the most frequently accessed data can be just about anywhere. /tmp might get heavy use by some apps, for example. You don't want too many head movements between a busy area and the swap area, as head movement (seek time) across a large number of tracks is quite slow, and will slow everything down. I always fit a second HDD, preferably on a seperate IDE cable, so that swap is never on the same disk as anything else that needs frequent access. For example, if you are dual-boot with Windoze, the swap partition for Linux wants to be on the same disk as Windoze, and conversely the swap file for Windoze wants to be in its own partition on the Linux disk. Despite what the monthly comics used to recommend, Windoze, like Linux, is very much better with a large, fixed swap file. And a well-known dirty trick is to put /boot right at the beginning of the disk, 100MB or so, followed immediately by swap, maybe 2GB (but please do give it more than you will ever need, not less, and it has nothing to do with 3 times the size of RAM as the idiots who write the monthly comics sometimes suggest), and then /, if you only want a simple partition configuration. Otherwise, put /tmp just before swap, which is just before /home, so the three busiest partitions are close, if you are going for a complex scheme. (/bin, /sbin and others tend to be accessed heavily for loading programs, not while they are running, so their location is not so important, contrary to certain opinions.)

And, of course, what file system(s) are you using? Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, XFS....... Each does excell in certain conditions, not in others, so the possibility of a substantial performance change exists. Ext2 is likely the fastest, but preferably not used, as it has no journalling. Almost everyone runs Ext3 or ReiserFS, and if you have done a manual install, you could have selected either, or even a different one on certain partitions. Or even DOS VFAT (ugh!)

Also you reinstalled. Were you asked any questions about DMA for the disks? (Also you should check your BIOS settings, to ensure that DMA and the fastest IDE/ATAPI mode available is selected. Don't ask me how, there are far too many BIOS variants, with different menus, to know which one you have, but it will probably be fairly obvious.) Did you change anything else? (CD/DVD and HDD on the same IDE cable is not good, for example.) Settings->Disks might show something (can't tell from my machine as it is SATA, so DMA options etc are not configurable, nor reported). Otherwise Settings->System Monitor may reveal performance problems.

Otherwise, the universal approach is to assume that the problem is caused by at least one thing that you changed, so carefully go over everything that you did. Different version of some library file, perhaps? Some updating with Adept? Something extra installed, or maybe missing?

Ideally you would go back exactly to where it was when performance was good, and carefully change one thing at a time until it went slow, but when you really need to reformat a machine that slow, methodical approach is not an option. You either reinstall or you don't.

But if you play around with the System Monitor (and you may have other similarly useful things installed too), and see where the problem is (CPU at 100% for example, would be quite obvious), and post your findings, we may be able to suggest some more things to try.

One last thought came to me, two things that are a real pain as regards performance, and should never, ever be used (not in Windoze either), are Winmodems, and using the USB interface for networking, cable modem etc. A real modem or using the network card for its intended purpose, has hardly any performance impact. I have seen far too many people whose broadband provider supplied them with some stupid USB thing, which killed their performance (not just the network, everything) until it was replaced by a device with proper ethernet interface. Easier to set up too, USB is only for keyboards, mice, scanners, printers, etc, never, ever networking.

Good luck!

**Auto** · Jan 01, 2007, 10:28 PM

Re: XGL-Beryl Ran Smoother Before

First of all, thank you for the inordinate amount if information.

In reference to the wacom devices, I do have them commented out as opposed to just deleting them.

As far as the reinstallation goes, I did the complete Kubuntu installation from the DVD. This included a reformat and a repartition. I am double booting with Windoze, but they are on separate drives, where the Kubuntu drive is the slave, just like the last installation. I'm pretty certain that I made all the same decisions that I made when I ran though it last time. Both times I used the text only installation, because the graphical one on the live CD's desktop crashed on me repeatedly. This has also happened to many others, as I understand it.

The partition that my root directory is on is using Ext3, which is the default. If it wasn't I would choose it anyways.

My best guess is that the problem is stemming from a menu that popped up one time when I started X11 using 'startx'. KDE popped open a wizard asking me about certain settings. I assumed my computer was fast enough so I just cranked the bar all the way to the right to the highest amount of options. Under the Kde desktop, without using Beryl, everything runs just fine, but, like I said, many things run slower with Beryl now. I searched around the settings, trying to lower everything in KDE, but I could never get that wizard back, and I couldn't recover the smooth frame rate I had before.

**tiger99** · Jan 02, 2007, 01:26 PM

Re: XGL-Beryl Ran Smoother Before

Interesting. So all the obvious things have been done correctly, and it comes down to some funny little menu.... Very frustrating.

I can't say that I have ever seen that particular thing, unless it was the Nvidia configuration tool, but why it should have popped up all by itself, I don't know. (It might not even be installed, by default.) On my machine it is System->NVIDIA X Server Settings. It does have a lot of things to fiddle with that will seriously degrade performance if changed inappropriately, and very little guidance as to what is best. Now if it was this menu, it would explain why xorg.conf is correct in every significant way, because this utility is fiddling with the driver itself. It does not usually need X to be restarted, as far as I have seen, which would imply that it is not simply fiddling with parameters in xorg.conf, as for example, Sax in SuSE would do.

I am guessing that if it was this menu, then the OpenGL Settings->Quality, or just possibly Antialiasing Settings will be the culprit, but I may well be wrong. On my Athlon 64 4800X2, which is quite fast, the Quality slider is only about 30%, and on that page only Allow Flipping is ticked, while on Antialiasing Settings, both sliders are at zero and nothing is ticked.

I am intrigued to know whether it is indeed these settings, and what sort of hardware would be needed to run everything at maximum anyway.

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