Why is Suse 9.3 Linux so slow 2854

You are wrong.

The retail SuSE Pro 9.3 comes with 2 DVD's and 5 CD's. Not everyone has a DVD drive; SuSE provides the CD's for folks who don't have DVD's (and for older systems that can't boot from a DVD). I installed my SuSE 9.3 from the 5 CD's.

Gilbert does indeed have a problem. I run a lowly PII-450Mhz with 384MB of RAM, and my performance is better than what the OP reported (9 secs for Mozilla, 24 secs for OpenOffice). My machine is a dual-boot setup (Win2k and SuSE 9.3), and the performance is comparable whether it's booted to Win2k or SuSE. Soooo, there is a major problem with Gilbert's setup.

I suspect that SuSE's installer has badly mis-configured something on the Gilbert's machine. Sadly, without additional information I have no idea what it might be.

This does not appear to be a Linux problem (since Ubuntu runs fine), but a SuSE-specific problem.

Here's some questions for Gilbert:

1) Is it a 32 bit or a 64 bit system? 2) Was the correct SuSE version installed (32 bit, 64 bit)? 3) Is the video driver configured correctly (Nvidia's can be problematic)? 4) Is DMA setup correctly for the hard drives, DVD's & CD's (via YaST)? 5) Are the network card & drivers configured correctly? 6) Is Apache running? If so, does stopping it fix the problem? 7) What does 'top' say is using all of the CPU cycles? (run 'top' from a command line).

I see these posts on occasion, where someone has terrible performance issues with SuSE - performance that is an order of magnitude out of bounds from what other users experience, but I've never seen anyone find the root-cause. If Gilbert is serious about finding the problem, we should buttist; the answers obtained might be useful to everyone.

Thanks & Regards, Larry