On optimizing software for speed..
Okay, I dont even try to understand much of this subject, but one interesting observation I have done lately.
As I am going to give back the Novell laptop in a few days, I have been moving stuff into my old, black Powerbook. I installed Ubuntu on it. It has 380 megabytes of memory and the processor is a 500MHz PowerPC G3.
This Thinkpad has a gig of ram and the cpu is 1.6 GHz. They feel equally fast in practice.
Whenever I want to swap a desktop workspace etc on the thinkpad, it munches the disk. There is an awful lot of "spin the disk" action going on all the time. All I can say (since I dont really pretend of being able to give advice on this subject to l33t hax0rs 
) is that I do really agree that we have a features over optimized code issue. Every little thing that we start opens a whole lot of stuff from the disk. My gig machine is also swapping from just Firefox, Evolution and Gimp. Yes, we need to focus on optimizing stuff. The functionality we have gained in the last few years is amazing - but we have also gained in size and become a bit slow in our walking..
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January 27th, 2006 - 09:26
Hi.
You propably knew this already but you could check your /proc/sys/vm value. Bigger the value is, more actively Linux swaps.
January 27th, 2006 - 19:50
*Just* Evolution, the Gimp and Firefox!
Those are some of the larger more resource hungry programs available.
Throw in a few more like OpenOffice and you might just be able to grind you machine to an incredibly slow speed so that it is unusable. I’ve older hardware so perhaps I’m more sensative but Gnome is definately far far slower than Windows 2000.
You might also try running gimp –no-data
Gimp is simply not designed to be slim or fast by default, even if you were a proffessional user and kept it open all day it would be difficult to make use of it all the features even if you were trying, so I’ve never though it was the best strategy and I wish they’d just load things on demand as and when they are needed.