Reasons for Ubuntu's relatively slow speed

[tdrusk]

It seems to me as well that something has gotten wrong with the latest iteration of Firefox. Loading a new page (especially a long one, very noticeable on things like slashdot) freezes the app. Firefox really should be threaded.
It has no impact on the rest of the system though although I expect it could have on a box with little RAM to spare.

Try Opera. It runs a lot smoother on my system.

[Dimitriid]

Ive been comparing Ubuntu with Arch. Now I used Ubuntu and Xubuntu 32 bit Feisty,

My desk system specs are: Sempron 2800+ ( socket 939 ), 7682mb ddr 333 ram, BFG nvidia 7600GT, run of the mill 80gb 7200rpm hdd.

Now I tried Feisty on the desktop then I tried Arch. I noticed quite a dramatic improvement. Arch as you know is very minimalist, does not even installs a desktop environment or even xorg. You have to pick your modules, install them, and add all the daemons you might need ( in my case it was only HAL, FAM and GDM I beliebe ). After that Arch gives you a Gnome install which is pretty basic. The speed improvement is definitely noticeable. Boot up takes 3 or 4 seconds less, applications open at least 1 second early, memory consumption has gone down a bit. Everything is slightly improved in response times, like going from Ubuntu to Xubuntu.

Now there are several reasons why this might be happening so maybe the more knowledgeable folks can pinpoint it better. But what I think it is might be either the barebones version of gnome ( all those little things like update manager, network manager, etc. ).
It might be the way Arch is build which optimizes specifically for x86 and x86 only ( although ive seen many laugh at that notion ). It might be the way the kernell is build for arch. Or it might be the rolling release system ( I never tried Gutsy on the desktop but Arch has mosts packages I use on equal or better versions than Gutsy and keeps updating everything everyday, there is no wait for a whole new release. )

But there IS a speed difference and on my hardware its definitely noticeable. Thoughts?

[jdong]

The difference is most likely related to what patches Arch has on top of the mentioned apps versus Ubuntu. Compiler optimizations and kernel configuration cannot make such a pronounced difference.

[FFred]

Try Opera. It runs a lot smoother on my system.

Unfortunately I really dislike the Opera interface nowadays...
I just make do with Firefox and sometimes Konqueror. I just wish it would be better
Opera is still an impressive piece of work though. It's true that it runs quite fast on pretty much anything.

[tdrusk]

Unfortunately I really dislike the Opera interface nowadays...
I just make do with Firefox and sometimes Konqueror. I just wish it would be better
Opera is still an impressive piece of work though. It's true that it runs quite fast on pretty much anything.

yeah. The MAIN reason I run it is because it crashes significantly less than firefox and konqueror with flash.