[FWTools] Performance

[Evert Groenewald]

I'm using FWTools1.0.0a2 on a computer with the following specs.
Motherboard: MSI K8N NEO4/SLI
CPU:   AMD Athlon 64-X2 4400+ SOCKET 939 Dual Core 64-Bit With HyperT 
<http://www.ngrcomputers.za.net/athlon-64x2-4400-socket-dual-core-64bit-with-hypert-p-2053.html>
Memory: 2x1GB Kingston DDR400
Graphics card: NVIDIA Geforce 6600 Turbo Edition 256 MB Memory
HHD: Western Digital 120GB SATA
OS: Linux SuSe 10.0  86_64 with a 4GB swapfile

The data I wish to view is in various file formats but the two primary 
files is in the .ecw format. The other files are mostly vector layers 
althought some of them contain a lot of data, my problem lies with the 
two .ecw files. The first is 142MB and the second 850MB in size. Opening 
the 142MB file noticably slows down the computer even when invoking the 
"-h" command during the start-up to enable hardware acceleration, but 
things are still workable. When I open the second file, the 850MB one, 
things virtually comes to a standstill. The two maps represented by the 
two .ecw raster layers overlap and ideally I would like to overlay them 
and then ad the vector layers as needed. At present this is impossible 
as everything grinds to a halt at the mere hint of opening the two files 
together.
My question is thus: Is there any way to improve performance by tweaking 
software or enabling settings I'm unaware of at present?
I did the install as suggested, eg:  ./install.sh   .
Thanks for the help.
Evert
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