How is Ubuntu so damn fast?

[phrostbyte]

Really, we have Core Duo processors with 2GB of RAM on our computer lab here, and the computers (Windows XP) run dog slow. Like seriously. It's depressing how such a fast computer can be brought to it's knees. I know it might not be a Microsoft software causing this, but a couple a stray processes shouldn't bring the whole system down with it. It's sad Ubuntu on a machine like that would fly. I know it's taboo to say but everyone should switch to Linux. :) Computing would be so much better.

[insane_alien]

i wouldn't call ubuntu fast. i mean, its hardly blazing. in the world of linux it is pretty mediocre speed wise.

the question should be 'How is Windows so damn slow? and how do Microsoft get away with it?'

[zero244]

People keep saying Windows XP is slow.......if you have anti virus software or things accessing disk space things can slow down. Or if you are accessing data over a network perhaps you may lose speed.
My machine is running on 1 gig or memory a mid level video card and XP is lighting fast. This is a two year old installation.
I don't run anti virus software or other disk utilities.
No disrespect to Ubuntu but XP is overall much faster than Ubuntu.
My Windows XP partition shuts down in about 10 seconds and loads in about 30 seconds.
Still I prefer Ubuntu for most of my computing.
The speed reduction in Ubuntu is far outweighed by the lack of virus problems etc.
Not to mention all the activation junk with Windows.
Plus I completely lock down my XP with third party security software. Otherwise I would have to run anti virus software in the background.
XP may be faster........but guess what I only use it when I have too.......I will take Ubuntu anyday of the week.

[ericesque]

I don't think you'll find that it is taboo to say people should switch to linux on this forum.

I have to agree though. Regardless of the fact that it is a 'mediocre' when compared to other distros, Ubuntu continually impresses me with it's ability to run on minimal hardware.

For example, one night my main box took a dump. I had an old ~333mhz machine with 128MB of ram. I ran ubuntu as a live-cd (keep in mind it was probably an 8x cd rom). It detected all of my hardware and I was online in no time. Don't get me wrong, it was nearly deathly slow to open firefox and gaim, but once they were up, it provided easily acceptable performance. Try XP on that kind of hardware and you'd probably end up with a BSOD that just said 'HAH!'

Right now (here's the real taboo) I run XP with Ubutnu in a virtual machine. I was pleasantly surprised with how fast it runs-- and the specs on the native machine aren't very impressive to begin with. Can you say socket A?

[mrgnash]

Ubuntu is a much more modern OS than XP, and hence I think it does probably have a little more overhead. That said, you can optimize it by using lightweight window managers/DEs (IceWM, XFCE, Fluxbox. Openbox, etc.) and browsers (Galeon, Epiphany, Dillo (sp?) ), trim down on unnecessary background processes and services, etc. etc. so that Ubuntu will run much better on older hardware than XP -- to say nothing of Vista. I oughta know; one of the things that made me switch to Ubuntu in the early days was the fact that it ran better on my woefully slow old 800mhz AMD something-or-rather. But then, on some occasions it brings my E6600 with 2GB of RAM to it's knees; although I think this is mainly due to FF-induced memory leaks and the like.

[hidey]

I'm curious: If Ubuntu is medicore, what are the fastest distros?

[rickyjones]

I'm curious: If Ubuntu is medicore, what are the fastest distros?

In my experience, anything that you compile yourself with specific optimizations for your CPU. I used to run Gentoo and this is why it was always speedy (of course, I could never tell the difference, hence I don't use Gentoo anymore).

-Richard

[Warren Watts]

the question should be 'How is Windows so damn slow? and how do Microsoft get away with it?'

My two cents:

Windows is so slow because it is written in tiny little pieces by a huge team composed of thousands of programmers, with no regard for memory or hard disk space conservation.

Every new computer that comes out has a faster processor, more memory, and more hard drive capacity. I don't think Micro$oft perceives a need to make their software run efficiently.

They get away with it because 99% of the population doesn't know there is anything else.

[DigitalDuality]

d

[proalan]

madriva was the slowest in my experience

Ubuntu is a slow distribution because its users don't tend to tinker with it as much as with other distributions. Seriously when was the last time you took time to install / configure applications by compiling from source rather than the generic apt-get method?

Although I would agree that ubuntu is faster than windows with exception to handling multimedia but thats down to using proprietary codecs in the first place like win32codecs. Everything else seems more resource efficient compared to that other os.

[mips]

Ubuntu is not exactly a speed demon in the world of linux, there are many distros that will make it look like a snail............

[mintcoffee]

My two cents:

Windows is so slow because it is written in tiny little pieces by a huge team composed of thousands of programmers, with no regard for memory or hard disk space conservation.


I don't mean to support windows in anyway since I run Ubuntu exclusively now... but how is this different from the open source world? :popcorn:

[aks44]

Originally Posted by Warren Watts
My two cents:

Windows is so slow because it is written in tiny little pieces by a huge team composed of thousands of programmers, with no regard for memory or hard disk space conservation.
I don't mean to support windows in anyway since I run Ubuntu exclusively now... but how is this different from the open source world? :popcorn:

The part I emphasized? ;)

[yuvlevental]

xp is dos-based, whereas ubuntu is unix-based Unix pwns!

[macogw]

I don't mean to support windows in anyway since I run Ubuntu exclusively now... but how is this different from the open source world? :popcorn:

Our devs worry about memory usage :p

[juxtaposed]

I'm curious: If Ubuntu is medicore, what are the fastest distros?

Debian for me.


xp is dos-based, whereas ubuntu is unix-based Unix pwns!

XP is NT based, not DOS.

[misfitpierce]

2 words... unix and MAGIC!

and... I didnt find Mandriva slow at all. Was pretty quick actually.

[cmat]

A clean install of XP is way faster than a clean install of Ubuntu. As soon as you start adding scanners, files, and other boot-up items it slows to a crawl. Ubuntu no matter how many thing are installed on it doesn't seem to slow down much. It would be nice in the future if the development team can work on optimizing the boot-up process.

[happy-and-lost]

I find Ubuntu a tad slow. Debian Sid with Fluxbox however...

[phrostbyte]

A clean install of XP is way faster than a clean install of Ubuntu. As soon as you start adding scanners, files, and other boot-up items it slows to a crawl. Ubuntu no matter how many thing are installed on it doesn't seem to slow down much. It would be nice in the future if the development team can work on optimizing the boot-up process.

Exactly. My g/f machine with 512 MB / Celery Processor runs faster then the 2 GB / Core Duo. Both have XP. The difference is I optimized the s**t out of her XP install.

There is some endemic in the Windows world. Windows software doesn't seem to respect the hardware it's running on. It's like the developers true goal is to see how much of a pig they make their applications.

[stchman]

I have found that XP is a little faster than Ubuntu. It should be because XP is circa 2001 and Ubuntu is far newer. The hardware specs on XP are much less than Ubuntu. it would be better to compare Ubuntu to Vista. Talk about dog slow.

Now, Ubuntu has a much smaller footprint that either XP or Vista and the applications themselves run faster because they are more efficient.

Overall I am very happy with Ubuntu.

[sugarland2k]

Ubuntu / Kubuu are the worlds coolest Linux Distros but since they "just work" they are not the fastest distros. If you want speed stay in the command line ;) or really, try Puppy Linux or DSmall Linux with 2 GB of memory on a fast machine.

XP is bloated with too many jukq programs and virus scanners, firewalls, etc. just slow it down even more...

feel the need for speed ;)

[macogw]

It would be nice in the future if the development team can work on optimizing the boot-up process.

They are. Ubuntu has Upstart, which is a project by Ubuntu devs to speed up the boot time. Other distros use plain old init scripts. Bootup time isn't really what should be compared, IMO, though. What about "it takes 3 seconds to load FF on XP and only 1 second to load FF on Ubuntu"?

[Hex_Mandos]

Ubuntu isn't blazing fast. Slackware based distros like Vector are far faster. The only distro ever found to be really slow was SuSE, but I was using older hardware (Debian w/GNOME worked ok in that same computer, and my brother is now using it with XP and he doesn't complain, even though I can't stand it's speed)

[cobrn1]

XP's ok when you first install it (it's no speed demon though...), its once you have firewall and antivirus installed that things start to go wrong...

It is quite incredible how fast ubuntu is - much better than XP, even though ubuntu is newer and has more features (and is a far superior OS) it still runs faster. Don't even compare it to vista... stupid hardware requirements and for what? Really, what did they add after 5 years???

As many have pointed out, while ubuntu might be fast it is comparatively mediocre - there are many other distros that run faster, however, ubuntu still runs really well, even in a linux world, so I'm not complaining.

What I find really good about ubuntu is the hardware requirements. I'm running P3 733Mhz, 128mb ram, but you only notice that when running apt. Otherwise its quite acceptable in ubuntu. XP on the other hand slows to a crawl under these conditions...

[omns]

Ubuntu isn't blazing fast. Slackware based distros like Vector are far faster.

I'd add Arch and Zenwalk to that list. Again Slack based and really slick distros

[M$LOL]

People keep saying Windows XP is slow.......if you have anti virus software or things accessing disk space things can slow down. Or if you are accessing data over a network perhaps you may lose speed.
My machine is running on 1 gig or memory a mid level video card and XP is lighting fast. This is a two year old installation.
I don't run anti virus software or other disk utilities.
No disrespect to Ubuntu but XP is overall much faster than Ubuntu.
My Windows XP partition shuts down in about 10 seconds and loads in about 30 seconds.
Still I prefer Ubuntu for most of my computing.
The speed reduction in Ubuntu is far outweighed by the lack of virus problems etc.
Not to mention all the activation junk with Windows.
Plus I completely lock down my XP with third party security software. Otherwise I would have to run anti virus software in the background.
XP may be faster........but guess what I only use it when I have too.......I will take Ubuntu anyday of the week.
XP is not faster than Ubuntu.

[misfitpierce]

Ive found Ubuntu to be faster than XP for me especially after about a week on XP the disk becomes fragged and starts to slow down. No doubt you can keep a windows pc somewhat fast by defragging and keeping registry clean etc. but all in all the registry always gets clogged up with crap and it becomes a bit sluggish. Then there is the fact of antivirus, antispyware, adware, firewall etc etc the list goes on and on. These programs run and slow down pc even more. Most antiviruses alone takke quite some memory which I find useless for it to be running. It's one reason I left windows for good.

[mrbungle]

how bout some xubuntu :)

[forcesofhabit]

Ubuntu is mediocre when it comes to speed in my opinion. In my experience SimplyMEPIS was faster than Dapper which it is based on...
how does that work?:confused:

[mrbungle]

Ubuntu is mediocre when it comes to speed in my opinion. In my experience SimplyMEPIS was faster than Dapper which it is based on...
how does that work?:confused:

yeah that's one thing that bums me out about ubuntu is how slow it can be. but xubuntu is just the cure.

[vexorian]

People keep saying Windows XP is slow.......if you have anti virus software or things accessing disk space things can slow down. Or if you are accessing data over a network perhaps you may lose speed.
My machine is running on 1 gig or memory a mid level video card and XP is lighting fast. This is a two year old installation.
I don't run anti virus software or other disk utilities.
No disrespect to Ubuntu but XP is overall much faster than Ubuntu.
My Windows XP partition shuts down in about 10 seconds and loads in about 30 seconds.
Still I prefer Ubuntu for most of my computing.
The speed reduction in Ubuntu is far outweighed by the lack of virus problems etc.
Not to mention all the activation junk with Windows.
Plus I completely lock down my XP with third party security software. Otherwise I would have to run anti virus software in the background.
XP may be faster........but guess what I only use it when I have too.......I will take Ubuntu anyday of the week.
I don't use antivirus or anti spyware, I don't have malware either, I made sure yo have good space for my page file, windows XP is still very slow.

[init1]

i wouldn't call ubuntu fast. i mean, its hardly blazing. in the world of linux it is pretty mediocre speed wise.

the question should be 'How is Windows so damn slow? and how do Microsoft get away with it?'
Because people are too ignorant to know/care about anything else. That's how.

[init1]

yeah that's one thing that bums me out about ubuntu is how slow it can be. but xubuntu is just the cure.
Nah, Vector is the cure. It rightfully claims to be the fastest non source distro.

[M$LOL]

I don't use antivirus or anti spyware, I don't have malware either, I made sure yo have good space for my page file, windows XP is still very slow.

If you don't use either, how do you know you don't have malware?

[ekravche]

I have Ubuntu running for 20 days now, and it's pretty speedy...

[ssam]

Really, we have Core Duo processors with 2GB of RAM on our computer lab here, and the computers (Windows XP) run dog slow.

some people find windows faster orthers find linux faster. it probably depends on the hardware, and how you perceive fastness.

linux is good add disk caching, so if you have lots of RAM (2GB is good), then it can get things quickly from RAM, without having to wait for a slow disk. (try installing preload, it monitors applications and trys to keep more useful things in the disk cache).

also on linux a single task usually involves multiple processes. this makes it easier the share work across multiple cores/processors.

[screaminj3sus]

Ubuntu has decent speed, but there are many faster distro's, but also many slow ones. I found some distro's such as PClinuxOS alot faster than ubuntu, in my experience openSuSE takes the cake for slowest distro, the boot time is completely ridiculous, and updates are incredibly slow.

[vexorian]

Fastest distro must be puppy.

But imho most people don't need the fastest distro but a fast enough one that is easy to deal with and got good support or documentation, and also imho Ubuntu is that distro.

[benenglish]

I suppose "fast" is entirely relative to needs. Ubuntu on my 2-year old AMD machine with 512 megs of RAM works just fine for me with one exception.

Like a lot of old-timers, I spend time with Usenet sourcing various files. It's not unusual for me to point Pan at a newsgroup, start it downloading everything, then walk away for a couple of days. When I return, there can be 30,000, 40,000, maybe 100,000 files in the targeted directory.

My Ubuntu/Gnome setup just won't open that folder and let me browse files. Well, that's unfair. Maybe, if I click the folder and walk away for an hour or so, it'll eventually open. Then, when I want to scroll through files, I can click and move the slider and wait several minutes for the file list to move. No matter how you slice it, though, it's unusable.

No big deal. I go to a terminal window, make some subdirs, mv files based on name until the total number of files per directory is reasonable, and then I can work again.

I cannot upgrade the hard drive for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, but I could upgrade this mobo with as much as 4 gigs of RAM. In y'alls experience, how much might that help?

[Brindled]

with Black Viper's Window's services guide you can make xp scream without much stability loss. when i run windows i run it without it's shell, and run an alternate that takes less resources and is more stable.

you can make xp pretty fast, but that's if you want to use such a product.

i simply abhor microsoft's and apple's market practices of fleecing the general public without making monumental improvements in computing.

[cmat]

I cannot upgrade the hard drive for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, but I could upgrade this mobo with as much as 4 gigs of RAM. In y'alls experience, how much might that help?

I'm not sure adding RAM will help. 32 bit operating systems can't map out that much memory. You need to go 64 bit or use "bigmem" on the kernel. I know people that did that on gaming PCs but they just wasted money.

[Stealth]

On my new comp, XP is a lot faster than Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is incredibly slow or anything either. However, I know with previous XP installations, once I had all my software installed, boot times were near a minute. Overall, the snappiness of both seem about the same (as long as I use Compiz, metacity is slow for me) and boot time goes in XP's favor by about 10 seconds (despite my Ubuntu boot opitmizations :()

[Warren Watts]

Windows is so slow because it is written in tiny little pieces by a huge team composed of thousands of programmers, with no regard for memory or hard disk space conservation

I don't mean to support windows in anyway since I run Ubuntu exclusively now... but how is this different from the open source world? :popcorn:

The part I emphasized? ;)

Exactly, aks33.

And yes, it's true, the Open Source community is composed of thousands of programmers that write tiny pieces, but the tiny pieces they write are designed to "plug in" to Linux's modular design. It's a lot more cohesive. Independent Linux developers seem to realize that not every Linux install is on the latest and greatest machine, with oodles of memory and disk space, and put a lot more thought into developing applications that aren't memory and disk space hogs.

And don't be concerned about being perceived as a Windows supporter just because you argue one point in their favor, mintcoffee... Although this is an Ubuntu forum, I tend to believe the Ubuntu Community is (for the most part) pretty open minded and unlikely to attack you just because you say something that might be perceived as pro-MS.

[tenmillionmilesaway]

Ubuntu has decent speed, but there are many faster distro's, but also many slow ones. I found some distro's such as PClinuxOS alot faster than ubuntu, in my experience openSuSE takes the cake for slowest distro, the boot time is completely ridiculous, and updates are incredibly slow.

I would have to agree with that, at work I use opensuse (with GNOME) on a machine with a core 2 duo and 4gigs of ram and general desktop use feels sluggish compared to my single core a64 with 1gig and ubuntu.

There are probably faster linux distros but the time that ubuntu saves you makes up for it, i don't want to think about how long it would have taken me to get gentoo setup the same as my current ubuntu install. I'm sure that it would be far longer than anytime i would save by using a fully setup gentoo box over ubuntu.

[treis]

On my new comp, XP is a lot faster than Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is incredibly slow or anything either. However, I know with previous XP installations, once I had all my software installed, boot times were near a minute. Overall, the snappiness of both seem about the same (as long as I use Compiz, metacity is slow for me) and boot time goes in XP's favor by about 10 seconds (despite my Ubuntu boot opitmizations :()

To be fair, that's not really XPs fault. It's the fault of crappy 3rd party programmers deciding that their program needs to run on boot up.

[livingtarget]

My windows system is terrible, I dual-boot into it once in a while but it's dreadfully slow. For once my Ubuntu installation runs better than windows, better drivers quicker boot time and better performance under high loads. I can listen to music when the cpu is spiking in Ubuntu. Under windows it quickly starts to stutter. I can run UT2004 (game) and a virtual copy of Windows XP with a voip program and it's running reasonable on Ubuntu.

Fair enough I tweak a lot & my windows has fallen into disrepair a little.

[miggols99]

I find that my Arch Linux install is much faster than my Ubuntu/Kubuntu install that I had before. Although XP boots faster, it take a while to login. On the other hand, Arch Linux (with KDEmod) boots a bit slower, but logs in really quick. In a few seconds I've a usable desktop with Compiz Fusion :) No antivirus or firewall bogging my computer down. Here's a nice comparison of XP vs. Ubuntu on speed.

I was fixing my sister's laptop because the sound broke. I had to move a file around, but I couldn't do it in XP, so I used my trusty Ubuntu live cd. It was so fast! The sound worked like a charm (unlike XP) and was so much faster! I moved the file and I fixed XP (mostly), but Ubuntu worked so much better (except for the wireless ;)).

[diesel1]

I too have a partition with Arch Linux(with KDEMod). It is the fastest booting os I have seen.

Diesel1.

[shuffman37]

I must admit a highly tweaked Ubuntu 9.04 system flies. I'm using it on a 28gb/2gb-swap ext4 partition short stroking my 320gb ide drive. Boots in about 20 seconds to log in with just the basic services running. Desktop with compiz and emerald load in about 10 seconds all tweaked. I've removed all of the addition junk (rhythmbox,totem. etc...) and just use vlc, firefox, seamonkey, google chrome and pidgin and this thing runs great on a old p4. Much faster than any other of the older versions of Ubuntu. Only about 1050 packages installed of the normal 1200ish on first boot. Also including all gstreamer packages along with nautilus extensions :P

[misfitpierce]

They don't rely on a bunch of crap DLL files scattered about and don't frag up like windows ntfs format... Also no registry clutter like windows which slows the machine hunting for things to run even the most simple app. Ubuntu/*Nix is just glorious. Period.

[Warpnow]

Alot of PC labs use VNC like things to monitor computer usage. The master computers have live displays of what's going on on each screen.

This slows down computer usage -alot-.

A windows XP machine with a hardware reset card can actually be -very- fast, but for general usege day to day, that's where XP slows down.

[Khakilang]

I don't think Ubuntu is slow cos I am using an old notebook and it perform quite well as for Window XP, it has to struggle a bit and that is the service 3. Don't know the reason why, it could be the graphic or the chipset driver.

[Warpnow]

I don't think Ubuntu is slow cos I am using an old notebook and it perform quite well as for Window XP, it has to struggle a bit and that is the service 3. Don't know the reason why, it could be the graphic or the chipset driver.

Test out:

Slitaz
Damn Small Linux
Puppy Linux

and you will see why they say ubuntu is slow.