Why is Suse 9.3 Linux so slow 2853

Sorry, no, this is not true anymore, since Office 2000. Youcanhave a "Microsoft Office" shortcut to OSA9.exe in your startup folder, but it no longer preloads all the libraries by default -- it simply adds the Office fonts unless they're already in the registry, and checks whether it should launch the Office Shortcut Bar and Find Fast. Neither are commonly used, so if you don't use either, you might as well remove-disable the shortcut and shave half a second off your login time.

*Without* having run this shortcut or having started any other office apps before since booting, starting up Word here takes about 3 seconds, and that's with the extra Proofing Tools with additional languages added. Excel takes about 2 seconds. (P4 3.06, 512MB RAM, W2k, WD1200JB HD)

Sorry, but that's mostly untrue too. If it were true, the startup time would have increased as much as time saved. Yes, *some* libraries are system wide and already pre-loaded, but the same is true for Mozilla too. After all, few people start up Mozilla under Unix without first having loaded libX11.so, libXft.so, limstdc++.so and a bunch of the other libraries it uses. If anything, I would think that Mozilla-Firefox has *more* libraries preloaded.

What he's seeing is not a graphics driver problem. It's not the actual repaint low-level job that takes time, but the *calculation* before X11 does its job, and the inefficient algorithms for calculating what should be redrawn.

KDE is abstracted the hell out of and with so many layers of clbutt inheritances and interdependencies that it *is* damn slow. It's sad when you can run Tcl-Tk script that runs faster than KDE equivalents.

To get some speed back, avoid KDE (and to a certain, but lesser extent Gnome) apps like the plague. Some apps can be recompiled to use Motif instead, and the speed difference is just astonishing. Installing and running prelink (prelink -ua; prelink -a) can also help quite a bit with startup times.

Switching to a different distribution can help too. SuSE might be convenient, but it's pretty darn slow compared to e.g. Gentoo (especially with -kde in the USE setting).

Regards, -- *Art