Billy Crook wrote:
I'd like to think I have a decent system. (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667, 7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500) I show it to people sometimes when they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work because it came preinfected with Vista. For the most part, my system ROCKS! But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things. It takes about two minutes to do a full restart. I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check. Still, I'd like to make it faster. I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for a long time. On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware wasn't half what I have now. I am less skilled with Linux than I am with Windows, but I'd like to change that.
There are modified boot sequence scripts for many distros that will speed up the boot process if that is your goal. The default scripts on most systems are inefficient, but they are also very robust in dealing with frequent and complex changes to the boot sequence. If you switch to one of the "fast boot" script sequences, then you may break everything if you add/change some essential service in the future. If people complain about the boot time on a default linux install, point out that they don't have to reboot as often as with Windows.
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Depending on what you are doing, changing these types of settings may not even produce a noticeable affect. Boot-time slowdowns are generally a result of waiting on timeouts, not disk I/O.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
There are some tricks you can pull to speed things up, though they aren't really all that worth-while unless you are really out to impress someone. On windows, IE and Office load so quickly because most of the software components are already in memory when the OS starts. You can get Linux to preload Firefox with http://www.techiecorner.com/48/speed-up-firefox-start-up-time-with-firefox-p... and you can preload openoffice by passing it a command line option (-quickstart doesn't work in 2.1, but -nodefault -nologo achieves roughly the same thing). If you launch these when the window manager session starts, then when users click the icon they will get to a usable window almost instantaneously.
~Bradley