Speeding up a machine

[Luke-Jr]

On Friday 09 March 2007 10:00:10 pm Billy Crook wrote:
> I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system.  hdparm
> was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata,

sdparm....?

> 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". 

IDE to SCSI emulation has been broken for a while. Throughput should be the 
same with the regular IDE driver properly setup.

> 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.

I recall from when I moved to Linux, that my biggest complaint was that 
opening cmd.exe on Windows was instantaneous (literally), and Konsole takes a 
good second or two to appear, even with prelinking and such. I'd like to know 
why Linux is so slow, as well.

Jeremy suggested a journalling filesystem over ext2-- however, during actual 
system running, ext2 would most likely be faster. Journalling really only 
helps with unexpected power loss and even then mainly just slows down 
booting. The difference between ext2 and ext3 *is* the journal. Without a 
journal, ext3 becomes ext2.

Gentoo's init system does support starting services in parellel.