Performance, Distributions and source packages

Hello everyone,

comparing the Linux client with the Windows Client on my system I gotta realize thast the SL performs way better under Windows. Partly that's probably because it's alpha software, partly because the Linux graphics drivers do not nescessarily support all features of OpenGL or the cards themselves. Partly the reason is probably that the OS is compiled and configured less than optimal for my system.

Now, I use Debian Linux (Etch) at the moment, after loosing my patience with Gentoo Linux. Gentoo Linux was way faster than Debian or even Windows (comparing the time needed to process a SETI@home package with the boinc client). However it didn't seem viable to me due to the extreme amount of maintance you needed to put into it to keep it up to date...

The question what kinda experience you made running SL using different distributions and if possible compared to Windows. Question is also weter you are using your own X servers, compiled for your CPU with your optimization flag, or wether you use a binary package. And if you use a src package, how much of a difference does it make.

Or does it make considerable difference which window system you use - such as Gnome or KDE...

I have heard otherwise, but haven't used WIndows since '95 so cannot confirm/deny from personal experience.



Are you useing proprietary drivers? The X-org drivers (for ATI at least) are 4x slower (and 100x more stable) than the ATI-provided ones ).



I don't believe KDE-vsGnome will make a difference - both are pretty bloated^H^H^H^H^H feature-full (I say that as a Gnome-user-wannabee KDE user). I HAVE heard, however, that a very lightweight window-manager like XFCE can make a noticable difference. Someone on here was talking about setting up an ultra-light window manager and minimised OS-services X-session exclusively for using SL. Hmmm. You might be able to further optimise by dedicating a spare runlevel (of which Debian has plenty) to SL.

I have run the SL client in a few different window managers. XFCE and Gnome mostly, with and without Compiz and various effects on Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I found no major differences in performance. System is dual core x86_64 4400+, 2gb RAM, SLI GeForce 7900GT 256mb. Bottle necks mostly exist at memory performance and graphics. If there are optimized video drivers that will probably be the first place to see a performance gain. Even while the cpu is at full speed SL does not use every cycle for game calculations, most of the cycles are just game idle loops so the system does not take away idle slices for other applications. Setting the affinity (taskset) to one core does help performance slightly as otherwise SL jumps from one processor to the other every second. Setting the rest of the system to the other core also helps.

Further speed otimizations will probably be made in the client itself. It is very hard to guage performance on Linux VS Windows as Windows is a homogenous environment where the user can't tweak the OS much, it comes as is and everyone gets the same thing. Linux is very different as users have control over everything starting at souce code. So someone could easily find a tweak in recompiling X, or the kernel and get a gain, or just by using a recently released kernel. If anyone has found any such interesting optimizations it might be neat to share.

Comparing Windows SL to Linux SL is perhaps not ENTIRELY fair, since in SL at least one extra quality option is enabled, which takes horsepower away from the FPS.

However, running OpenSuse 10.0 + KDE, I get around 12 fps in a certain area, once everything has stabilised, and 14 fps with Windows XP.

I can only assume this is because of the Fully Working Features we now have - previously, on the "broken" client ( that did SO much to liven up this forum and build a community ), the SL Linux client was 20% faster than the Windows client.

You can get a BIT extra out of SL if you don't run Opera with 20 tabs open, and KDE. It is also faster (on another system with OpenSuse 10.2) if you don't run XGL/Compiz - but that MAY be because the Graphic card there, an FX 5200, is not REALLY supported under Compiz. On that system, according to "top", X takes 50% of the cpu for itself with XGL / Compiz

When my graphic driver was crazy (until I set it to AGP 4X), I could only run SL under fvwm, since KDE did not even start. That may help as well.

It may be inherent in the Linux Architecture - X runs mainly outside of the kernel, in Windows it runs inside the kernel - which is one of the reasons Windows is so flaky

-----------
Addendum:
With Opera running (less tabs open though), and my video card overclocked to 480 MHz /2.08 GHz (standard is 425 / 2.00), SL Windows gets about the same frame rate as SL Linux - the video card is not overclocked in Linux.

So I cannot really confirm that Linux performance is poorer...

Well, it seems it was mostly my mistake. I didn't read the readme file - otherwise I would have known how to enable all features and therefore use the agp features. Now SL performs about as well as Linux does. Can't say for sure which performs better without actual testing.

Linux is better in so far that it task switches faster though - I can quickly switch to an internet browser or another desktop panel, while under Windows you really hear how it gets every single byte back from the swap file. Either Linux manages its memory generally better, needs less, or the swap partitions are faster than swap files. Probably mostly that it needs less, since all applications actually share their libraries.

I am using an "nvidia" (as opposed to "nv" driver on my system... maintained by the Debian package manager though, since I recently had problems with the packages from nvidia. Well, maybe they're sometimes a month behind nvidia, but I don't think any longer.

I had a look into "apt-build". That's use to install Debian "Source" Packages... but for now I am not sure which packages I'd need to compile. I think I'll start finding out which Gnome libraries are important and if that works which X libraries are important... and then... maybe libc, even though that is already 686 build which is not perfect, but not for from it for an Athlon XP CPU.

Don't bother with this. Recompiling your libraries is a waste of time if you're looking for a performance improvement. Most of the libraries SL depends on are included with the shipped package and are used by default. The only critical one is SDL, but SDL provides no overhead as far as performance goes. I've been a developer and Linux user for 8 years, and I build my Linux systems from scratch, so I know this area very well. And under *NO* circumstances should you fiddle with glibc. It's very easy to make the entire system completely unusable. Also, if it's already optimized for i686, you won't get a boost optimizing for "athlon-xp." In fact, optimizing beyond i686 is very dangerous and is likely to cause performance to go DOWN. Don't listen to what anyone tells you about optimizing more; it's always bad. Those compiler settings are designed for specific code cases. i686 is a great general choice that rarely causes problems. The misconception of "optimizing more is better" is typically spread by inexperienced Gentoo folk, but other people suffer from it as well. Binary package maintainers [should] never do this because they [should] know how foolish it is. You're granted the *possibility* of faster performance, but you are also *guaranteed* instability; especially in newer versions of GCC (4.x is notoriously buggy).

If you're using the official "nvidia" driver, you are likely getting the best performance you're going to get. Although, using GNOME is a bad idea, as it uses a lot of memory and can eat up CPU cycles. I use Openbox, with nothing else. Very lightweight with insanely good performance, but I am on an older system (PIII) so I need it. I have an nVidia card as well, but my issues with SL aren't in the area of speed, but rather the memory leak in the current release series.

The best way to gain performance is to close extra applications. Anything that is constantly running in the background and eating up CPU cycles will degrade the performance. GNOME has a lot of daemons, so it's likely to bring you down.

[EDIT] I should also mention that in my experience KDE has performed quite a bit better than GNOME; though it, too, has a lot of daemons running in the background and can use more memory, but it is typically faster. Possibly due to the fact that it uses Qt as its toolkit, which depends on a fraction of the libraries that GTK+ does, which GNOME uses. GTK+ also uses Cairo for most of its drawing and most recent GTK+ theme engines depend on it as well. Cairo will cause things to be very slow until the next major release. If you can get Cairo 1.3.10, or newer, installed you will notice a significant boost in GTK+ performance. It shouldn't break anything. I've been using it for a while without any problems.

I hope this information helps.

Cheers,
AR

Quite likely.


Unquestionably. - as you say, more code sharing between apps.


I have good reason to believe this is significant - Linux CAN use a swap file instead of a partition, but it is strongly recommended against.

I have a paltry 1G of RAM in my system and I rarely use even 2/3 of it - that includes the disk caching! I have recently been getting messages in my system log file along the lines of:

Dec 29 13:53:22 LaeMi kernel: Adding 1048816k swap on /dev/hda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1048816k
Dec 29 13:53:22 LaeMi swap: LaeMi, why do you ignore me? When you had 128M physical RAM we used to have so much fun together. Now you never even notice me

For me SL works much better and runs much smoother on linux than when i had it running on windows.

Faster grahpics, less lag and more enjoyable than on windows. Though i still miss a better file dialog, mabye get the native one for the X your running? I think SL gets gnomes file dialog or something and I like to have KDE file dialog with the shortcuts to diffrent folders i use a lot

My computer has got:
Kubuntu 6.10 Edgy
P4 3.2 ghz 64-bit
2GB ram
GeForce 7800 GTX - SLI
2x SATA2 300GB HDDs 7200rpm w/ 16mb cache.

I switched over few months ago, was a bit hard to start with, but now I have got all the programs and games I need to have on linux working or found equal replacements. Actually my over all experience with developing things for SL and websites has increased dramatically since i switched Kubuntu is also nice, i like KDE and with the nice package system i rarely get into any problems