Performance Improvements

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 13:53 +1100, James McDonald wrote:
> I'm using Ubuntu Edgy. Programs such as GQView take a long time to redraw
> jpegs. OpenOffice is traditionally slow to load but I wouldn't mind if it
> was a bit more peppy. Web browsing using Firefox isn't as snappy as it
> once was.

Can't help you with GQView, but for OpenOffice you may want to consider
using a different Java distribution. I don't know what Java distribution
comes with Ubuntu, but you may want to consider using IBM's JRE. Use
Java 5 rather than 1.4.x. You can download it from
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/download.html
(Requires free registration). If Ubuntu is using gcj, you'll probably
see a huge speed improvement. Still not native speed, but pretty snappy
nonetheless. 

As for web browsing, I've often found that Firefox depends a lot on DNS
resolution and whether you have IPv6 enabled or not. For myself, I've
setup a local caching-only DNS on my laptop (Singapore DNS servers can
sometimes be a little cranky or slow -- kinda like how I am now...) and
I have IPv6 disabled. That speeds things up quite a bit. There are some
other tweaks you can use like pipe-lining -- but that depends on whether
you regularly view pages with a lot of graphics on them, otherwise, I
think the difference is not going to be significant.

HTH
pascal chong