Speeding up a machine

[Scott Oertel]

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.
>
> 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?
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In gentoo there is an option to have the rc scripts run in parallel, 
this speeds up the boot sequence 100%, I'm not sure if Fedora has this 
option but you can look. Anyway,  in gentoo if you put 
RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes" in to /etc/conf/rc  it should do the trick.


-SO