Fedora is strangely slow on my laptop (F10 & 11; Acer Aspire 5050)

Cuvou · #1 29th April 2009, 10:28 PM

It might just be me, but Fedora seems to run really slow on my laptop compared to other systems I run it on. The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5050, specs:

* Make: Acer Aspire 5050
* Hard drive: 80 GB
* RAM: 1024 MB
* Processor: AMD Turion 64
* Graphics: ATI Radeon 1100 Onboard
* Wireless: Atheros AR5007EG Onboard Wireless Card
* Operating System: Fedora 11 Rawhide i386

It came with Vista Home Premium which I promptly cured, and right now it's running Fedora 11 on the Rawhide repos. I don't recall any slowness really standing out when it had Fedora 9 on it, but since Fedora 10 I started to notice it.

It's most apparent when I run VirtualBox, to run a Windows XP guest machine with 192 MB of RAM (first I gave it 256 and it was unbearably slow so I dropped it to 192, but got no increase in performance regardless). I know, running multiple operating systems is a performance hit. However, it's worse than it should be considering the 1024 MB of RAM. On my home PC (an eMachines with a 32-bit Intel Celeron ~3.3GHz processor), which came with a measly 512 MB, I was still able to run Windows XP in VirtualBox and give it 192 MB of RAM, and it ran pretty well with that. I later upgraded my home PC to 2GB only because I wanted to run newer Microsoft OS's as virtual machines, like Vista.

But with 512MB of host memory on my desktop and 192MB for the guest, Windows XP ran well; with 1GB of host memory on my laptop and still 192MB for the guest, Windows XP is terribly slow. I just installed a new Windows XP virtual machine, it's the only VM running... the Out-of-Box Experience (first boot thing) was too slow to use so I just rebooted, accepting the fact that now it will log me on as Administrator because I didn't get to the part for creating users, and it's been on the "Setting up personalized settings for:" stage for the longest time.

I'm considering upgrading its RAM to 2 GB, but I'm not sure if that's the problem (or if it's the only problem), considering that another PC with half as much RAM was capable of running virtual machines better. Are there any other known issues with this model of laptop? The processor speed, maybe? I know Acer has some drivers for Windows specifically about the processor, though I'm not sure what they do exactly.

Cuvou · #2 7th May 2009, 06:28 PM

I'm thinking it's that Fedora (or Linux in general) doesn't know how to use my processor efficiently. I installed Windows 7 RC on it, and even with the full aero desktop effects, it runs blazingly fast (in contrast, Fedora 11 with XFCE, no compositing window manager, no eye candy, runs generally more sluggish than Windows 7 + Aero).

greg.harvey · #3 1st June 2009, 01:59 PM

Also having very slow Acer issues... this one is an Acer Aspire 4315. Generally sluggish to do "stuff" and wireless is horribly slow and with really poor signal (but wasn't when it ran XP or Ubuntu, though with Ubuntu it kept dropping the wifi connection and requiring a reboot before it would pick it up again...)

Intel Celeron 530 is the processor though, so unlikely to be the same issue. Weird though. No problems with anything else. My Dell breezes it, even my EEE PC 901!

Wifi is an Atheros card.

joe.pelayo · #4 17th July 2009, 02:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cuvou

It might just be me, but Fedora seems to run really slow on my laptop compared to other systems I run it on. The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5050, specs:

* Make: Acer Aspire 5050
* Hard drive: 80 GB
* RAM: 1024 MB
* Processor: AMD Turion 64
* Graphics: ATI Radeon 1100 Onboard
* Wireless: Atheros AR5007EG Onboard Wireless Card
* Operating System: Fedora 11 Rawhide i386

It came with Vista Home Premium which I promptly cured, and right now it's running Fedora 11 on the Rawhide repos. I don't recall any slowness really standing out when it had Fedora 9 on it, but since Fedora 10 I started to notice it.

It's most apparent when I run VirtualBox, to run a Windows XP guest machine with 192 MB of RAM (first I gave it 256 and it was unbearably slow so I dropped it to 192, but got no increase in performance regardless). I know, running multiple operating systems is a performance hit. However, it's worse than it should be considering the 1024 MB of RAM. On my home PC (an eMachines with a 32-bit Intel Celeron ~3.3GHz processor), which came with a measly 512 MB, I was still able to run Windows XP in VirtualBox and give it 192 MB of RAM, and it ran pretty well with that. I later upgraded my home PC to 2GB only because I wanted to run newer Microsoft OS's as virtual machines, like Vista.

But with 512MB of host memory on my desktop and 192MB for the guest, Windows XP ran well; with 1GB of host memory on my laptop and still 192MB for the guest, Windows XP is terribly slow. I just installed a new Windows XP virtual machine, it's the only VM running... the Out-of-Box Experience (first boot thing) was too slow to use so I just rebooted, accepting the fact that now it will log me on as Administrator because I didn't get to the part for creating users, and it's been on the "Setting up personalized settings for:" stage for the longest time.

I'm considering upgrading its RAM to 2 GB, but I'm not sure if that's the problem (or if it's the only problem), considering that another PC with half as much RAM was capable of running virtual machines better. Are there any other known issues with this model of laptop? The processor speed, maybe? I know Acer has some drivers for Windows specifically about the processor, though I'm not sure what they do exactly.

Hi.

Is Fedora installed in the whole drive? Perhaps the problem is the drive itself.

I have an Acer Aspire 5102WLMi laptop which is basically the same laptop as yours (except for a Turion X2 processor), in fact the restore CD for the 5050 works perfectly for the 5100... and it used to have Fedora 10 (and later Fedora 11) installed alongside with Windows. The fact is that Fedora was unstable and used to hang from time to time. Just then I got another laptop and I formatted that one (now putting F11 in the partition where Windows was), and guess what? I almost regretted for getting this new laptop because that one ran really smoothly!

And with this laptop I had another 'episode'. I installed F11 on a partition in the middle of the drive (250GB) and noticed it was really slow: there were occasions where the old one was a little bit faster. I was also prompted to do fsck from time to time. It turned out that the drive got bad sectors and I put Fedora just on top of them (right now I am using Fedora 11 installed on a different partition at the beginning of the drive...the smoothest experience ever!)

Have you tried to boot from a Fedora live USB? Try installing and using livecd-tools (you'll only need a Fedora 11 ISO image and a 1GB flash drive), that way you'll be able to make some performance comparisons. I'll also try to borrow a hard drive (or install on a different partition) just in case...

Good luck.
Joe.

greg.harvey · #5 17th July 2009, 08:26 AM

Hi,

I actually forgot about this thread, but in the end my issue was down to network latency/driver issues. Our Acer had previously run Ubuntu and the madwifi wireless drivers to drive the Atheros wireless network card. However on Ubuntu madwifi kept dropping the connection and refusing to see the network any more once it was dropped, so when I moved to Fedora I decided to try the other Atheros driver option (which is usually recommended), the ath5k driver.

This seemed to function much more solidly (never dropped connection) but the computer was very slow generally and I started to get suspicious because it never seemed to get a transfer rate of more than about 10 kbps, even over the WLAN! Last straw was when I installed the printer and hi-resolution colour print-outs were taking anything up to an hour a page, because the data was trickling so slowly to the printer.

So I switched back to the madwifi driver on Fedora, thinking it might be a) a newer version now and b) work better than it did in Ubuntu. And it did! It also solved *all* the performance issues, so obviously the ath5k driver was doing bad things on my machine.

So worth trying the madwifi driver instead of ath5k, if you are using ath5k, and seeing if that improves your computer's performance. =)

joe.pelayo · #6 17th July 2009, 09:11 AM

Good to know it is solved.

Cheers.
Joe.

tdell · #7 17th July 2009, 11:26 AM

Strange I have exactly the same laptop and have no issues. Running F10 64bit not brave enough yet to update to F11.

greg.harvey · #8 18th July 2009, 08:34 AM

Could be a combination of ath5k driver, Atheros network card and the crappy router our ISP dumped on us (we have to use it because of the ADSL TV package my wife signed up to... grrr...) Wireless "standards" still aren't so standard, so odd issues between bits of hardware, particularly when they're all cheap bits of hardware, are not at all uncommon. That's why wireless supports is still a bit immature in Linux. =(