Speeding up a machine

[Kyle Sexton]

On 3/9/07, Billy Crook <billycrook at gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> So far, I've trimmed down what services start at boot, I even have VMWare
> set not to start automatically, which should shave off a few seconds (No VMs
> are configured to start on their own, only the service was.)  I wish the
> stuff that starts up on boot could start up asynchronously, or as
> asynchronously as possible.  I'm not holding my breath on that though.
> Also, my display flickers every now and then.  It doesn't appear to affect
> the applications or the system.  It happens with and without beryl and
> vmware running.  I'm using nvidia's latest driver as well.  Any ideas?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Kclug mailing list
> Kclug at kclug.org
> http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
>
>
To help speed up boot times you might want to check the Upstart project that
Ubuntu has been working on.  I know that it's supposed to speed up boot
times by replacing the old way init works.  I'm not sure if it's made it's
way onto Fedora yet though (or if it will).


-- 
Kyle Sexton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://kclug.org/pipermail/kclug/attachments/20070309/645b71f4/attachment-0001.htm