Thanks, Paul.  This was very informative.  I will try the "Write-Behind".  I 
will look into the Athalon processor.  I do run Seti@Home also.

On Sunday 18 February 2001 05:14, you wrote:
> About the only thing that might help is setting your motherboard for
> "Write-Behind" for the K6 cache (the default is "Write-Through" which
> is what's done by Pentiums).  This will give some improvement
> especially if you're running code that stays in the CPU's cache.
>
> Perhaps it's time to upgrade to an Athlon or Duron...  The K6 doesn't
> have the best FPU.  It falls somewhere between the Pentium and Pentium
> Pro family (PPro, PII, and PIII) for clock cycles/FPU instruction.  So
> encoding MP3s or anything heavily using the FPU is going to be slow.
>
> FPU-wise, the K6-3 450MHz was slightly slower than my notebook's
> 300Mhz Pentium II.  A K6-3 475 might have been about equal.  This is
> based on running seti@home.
>
> I running Linux on my notebook, a 300Mhz Pentium II.  It doesn't seem
> slow to me, but when had to reload RedHat 6.2 last month, I logged
> into my file server (a 900MHz Athlon, formerly a K6-3 450MHz, formerly
> a K6-2 300MHz :-) and Netscape was damn fast. :-) You must have gotten
> the taste for speed from somewhere...
>
>
> Sorry if I'm coming into this thread in the middle.  I just discovered
> today that messages from this mailing list had been disabled for me
> (and had been for several months).  Just to confuse things, I would
> occasionally receive one or two messages about once a month, so I
> thought this list was dead rather the me being turned off.
>
>         -Paul
>
> On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Rick Rosinski wrote:
> > My CPU is an AMD K6-III 400Mhz.  I just want to get the best out of Linux
> > (plus I like to tinker with it).  I am using Slackware 7.1 (but I updated
> > many of the basic utilities and upgraded the kernel to 2.4.1).  I haven't
> > changed anything related to the disk cache and mem buffer (because I
> > don't know how to).  I am afraid of messing with RAM disks only because I
> > tend to forget to copy things back to disk to save important info (but of
> > course, I can implement shut-down or crontab scripts that will do that
> > for me).  I use my system for web administration, with apache, perl and
> > mysql. I also work with large 600 bpi photo images with the gimp.  I do
> > lots of work with sound files, especially encoding wav's to mp3's.   Is
> > there a way to decrease the amount of caching that the system does?   I
> > also tried hdparm -c3d1 and found that my system defaults to 32-bit & dma
> > mode because there was no difference in the benchmark tests (using hdparm
> > -Tt on the drive before and after the -c3d1 switch).  Any more
> > suggestions?
> >
> > > * On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 01:38:08AM +0000, Rick Rosinski wrote:
> > > > I don't mean to be long-winded, I just want to know if anybody had
> > > > found any tricks that makes a noticable difference in the speed of
> > > > linux
> > > >
> > > > I am looking for any way to speed up linux.  I have upgraded to the
> > > > 2.4 kernel, and boot time takes less time.  Great.  If it improves
> > > > the speed (and smoothness) of programs in run-time, those hard drives
> > > > are holding them back. So, I checked out some old PLUG mail and found
> > > > stuff about the hdparm utility (from "linux too slow") and I gave
> > > > that a shot.  I found out that my drives were already running in
> > > > 32-bit mode - because the benchmark tests yielded the same results. 
> > > > I used "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda" to test the drive. Then, I did a "hdparm
> > > > -c3d1 /dev/hda".  This said that 32-bit dma was activated.  Then I
> > > > did hte hdparm -Tt /dev/hda again and the results were the same.  I
> > > > have 400 MB ram and two swap partitions totalling 267,544 MB, and the
> > > > swap is hardly ever used (using "free" and "kpm" (KDE Process
> > > > Manager)). I tried to upgrade to XFree86 4.0.2, but the compilation
> > > > forced out a kernel bug in inode.c and that is too scary to try again
> > > > (since inode.c is part of the file management system) - and a crash
> > > > that forced me to reformat a partition.
>
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-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com