Speeding up a machine

[Bradley Hook]

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-preloader/
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