Puppy's great performance: how is it reached?

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bmn
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Joined: Sat 08 Apr 2006, 01:19

Puppy's great performance: how is it reached?

#1 Post by bmn »

just wondering how the great performance (fast starting apps) in puppy is reached?
i know you can recompile programs with e.g. gui libraries so that they start faster. what i want to know is, if sth. like this was done for puppy or simple the apps are starting that fast and would also do this on e.g. ubuntu with fluxbox?

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zigbert
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#2 Post by zigbert »

Normally Linux (and other operating systems) starts programs from harddisk. Then programs are loaded into memory (RAM) and they starts. Puppy skips this prosess because programs and linux are loaded into memory when computer are turned on. This makes the big difference between Ubuntu (and others) and Puppy. To reach this programs and linux core has to be small. The normal amount of memory is far from the size of a normal harddisk.

GuestToo
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#3 Post by GuestToo »

Most of Puppy's programs are small and fast as opposed to bloated and slow, which is the main reason why they start quickly. Yes, programs like Rox and Leafpad will start up almost as quickly in Ubantu as they will in Puppy

they will start slightly faster in Puppy because they are all already in ram so Puppy does not need to fetch them from the hard drive

also, some window managers are faster than other wms. For example, KDE might take 30 seconds to start, while JWM or Icewm might start in less than 3 seconds

Goble
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#4 Post by Goble »

I have normal hard drive installation of Puppy 2.01 so the RAM disk issue doesn't apply in this scenario.

However, Puppy is still amazingly fast to boot even when it reads everything from hard-disk file by file. It takes only 35secs after a cold boot and I'm looking at X desktop (Xorg with default Puppy 2.x window manager). The hardware is small and "slow" 1Ghz Epia M10000 with veeeery old 40gb hard disk. I assume booting would be even faster in "normal modern desktop PC" running 3Ghz processor with fast IDE/SATA hard disk.

I understand that booting Live-cd and running everything from RAM disk using SquashFS is fast way to read files. What I don't understand how Puppy author (BarryK) has done the same with normal HD installation. Is it really because of carefully chosen "non-bloated" apps or has Barry added some of extra magic in Puppy? Why other distros really take that long to boot when Puppy is ultra fast?

GuestToo
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#5 Post by GuestToo »

Is it really because of carefully chosen "non-bloated" apps
i think the choice of apps makes more difference than any other factor ... it does help that the whole operating system is small and light, and is not starting a lot of unnecessary servers, and is intended to run completely in ram

Rox starts more quickly than Konqueror ... JWM starts more quickly than KDE ... Leafpad starts more quickly than Kate or Kwrite or Gedit ... etc etc

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