# howto optimize gentoo for old slow laptop?

## warthog

I've got an old IBM thinkpad brick w/a celery 266mhz cpu and upgraded to 256 MB ram.  It's SLOW!  I wiped off Win98 and installed gentoo from stage 3 (using gentoo-sources 2.4.22-rX).  Then I installed XFCE4, mozilla/firefox, and xsane.  It took a long time to compile everything, but I just let it go for a couple of days, and everything installed smoothly gentoo-style.

I primarliy use this brick for is surfing the web, for web-based e-mail, and for some occasional flat-bed scanning.  The main problem is that it takes forever  :Shocked:   for mozilla to process web pages, and generally takes forever + 1 day to launch apps (like XFCE's file-manager-thingy).  I keep an eye on memory and it's doing a great job of keeping out of swap, but after a few days of up-time it begins to dip into swap, which tells me there might be some code leakage somewhere maybe?

In any case, does anyone have any suggestions about what I can do to speed this thing up a little?  I've done some poking around the forums, which is where I got the idea to use Gentoo & XFCE in the first place, but I seem to have hit a brick wall -- so to speak.  I've done my best to keep this brick as stripped-down as possible as far as apps and running processes go.  Would it be worth moving to the gentoo-dev-sources (2.6.3-rX)?  I've read conflicting reports that the 2.6 series is faster. Any other suggestions are also welcome, like is there a slim version of mozilla around?  (and no, text-based browsers like links or lynks are not what I'm talking about) Or maybe I should use it as a door stop or an anchor for a large ship?

Thanks for your help!

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## juliancoccia

Maybe you are just asking too much... Dunno, I have a 550Mhz Thinkpad 128Mb with XCFE 4. Mozilla runs ok, buk it takes time to load up. When I open a new webpage I can notice a bit of a CPU delay while it renders the webpage but I do not care as I know the processor and video limitations.

I did take some extra time to find the best recommended CFLAGS for this Celeron Mendocino processor and the machine does perform I would say a 20% faster than the stripped down Debian I used previously.

Maybe it is just time for a hardware upgrade   :Wink: 

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## Doomwookie

I use fluxbox/KDE with Opera on my Toshiba Tecra 750DVD 233MHz Pentium MMX laptop with 128MHz of RAM and no DMA.  (Upgraded the origional 5GB drive to 30GB.  DMA can't be enabled due to a bug in the bios relating to large hard drives.)  Opera is a lot more responsive/faster loading than mozilla/firefox on slower systems.  Using a lighter WM like fluxbox or enlightenment really helps increase responsiveness.  You can also try compiling with the "-Os" CFLAG to optimize for size, which can help loading times. 

I havn't really noticed where there was much increase in performance on that laptop when I moved to kernel 2.6 on it.  But I have noticed performance increases on just about everything else I have upgraded to 2.6.

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## warthog

I tried the Opera browser, and while it was quicker, I have become addicted to the ease of use and the nice AA fonts of the firefox browser.  However, I did add the "-Os" flag to my make.conf, and hopefully that will produce slightly more responsive applications in the future.  I'm using XFCE4 which I feel is pretty lightweight, and the memory usage is fairly low.  In any case, thanks everyone for your suggestions!   :Very Happy: 

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## rockfly

you could try an emerge -e world to recompile everything for the optimalisation  :Razz: 

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## yngwin

I'd go for a nice lightweight window manager like kahakai or fluxbox, and use firefox as a browser - it's really fast.

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## flybynite

memory is your friend.  I have a Pent II 266 which run just fine with 700MB....

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## cpdsaorg

another thing that can dramaticly speed up load times is the HD. I bought a new Seagate Baracuda 120Gig for my old p2/233 and man did that make a diference!! Not only is it much faster but it is quiet too.

I am now looking into getting a faster/bigger HD for my p3/500 laptop too. Just waiting for the prices on the 80 gig laptop drives to drop a little more.   :Wink: 

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## Marctraider

My 233mhz 96Mb ram 4Gb hd laptop runs like a charm, just ook me 9 months to research all possible optimizations! :)

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## warthog

 *Marctraider wrote:*   

> My 233mhz 96Mb ram 4Gb hd laptop runs like a charm, just ook me 9 months to research all possible optimizations! 

 

so what optimizations did you use?

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## Marctraider

Heh that are alot of optimizations, i will make a nice doc soon so you maybe that can help you.

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## iamben

-Os makes smaller binaries, not faster ones.  256mb ram isnt that low, so i dont think -Os will do much for you.

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## drakonite

 *iamben wrote:*   

> -Os makes smaller binaries, not faster ones.  256mb ram isnt that low, so i dont think -Os will do much for you.

 

With small amounts of RAM and small caches (like on a celery) using -Os can cause speed increases in many cases by reducing swapping and cache misses.

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