For those who installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft (or Kubuntu) and have an Athlon 64, doesn’t it seem a bit slower than the distro you were using before?

When I finished installing it, I was happy with the new distro, much prettier and polished than Debian testing, with the advantage of being practically the same thing, so it was, I think, a good decision. The problem was that, as I said, everything was a bit slow. I didn’t understand why, until I started looking at the services that start up: common things like apmd, cupsys, gdm… powernowd. The latter reminded me of my experience with Gentoo, and how good it is to have a kernel prepared for 64 bits, since, beyond the optimizations it must have, I can switch between the two frequencies the processor supports: 800 and 1800 MHz. What do I gain? Lower temperatures. These days, about two degrees less.

But I don’t use a 64-bit version of Ubuntu… so maybe the kernel is tweaked, or maybe this could be done in my previous Debian testing for i386. I don’t know, the thing is that this service, powernowd, is what constantly “checked” the CPU usage, and accordingly lowered or raised the frequency. An excellent option, but one that slightly increases application response time, and that was my impression of “Ubuntu being slower.”

What I do now is disable that service, and start it in emergencies.