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87 Comments
- tvanwyk, on 12/15/2007, -1/+37Removing tty's isn't going to save much in terms of system resources; if you're so tight on system resources that you feel the need to disable some of these, you are probably trying to do too much with your hardware and need to cut elsewhere - such as in your apps and GUI choice. But the services is worth a mention because so many distros come so bloated with services and daemons that are unnecessary for most users.
(Hmm... says Linux in the title but seems very Ubuntu-centric.) - atdigg, on 12/15/2007, -1/+26some of them are pretty ridiculous, for example the one about eliminating terminals... do you know how much memory you save with that... that might be a good tip if you talk about embedded devices, but for desktops that have 1GB saving some KB is plain ridiculous.
- TeacherOfHeroes, on 12/15/2007, -0/+19"(Hmm... says Linux in the title but seems very Ubuntu-centric.)"
Yet if it said 'Ubuntu', someone would say something like: 'These apply to ALL of Linux, not just Ubuntu, you know' - kingofpenguins, on 12/15/2007, -0/+14That's why I love Archlinux, I have a Linux system built exactly for me with none of the bloat. For a desktop environment, I use KDEmod, because it lets me install only the applications I want.
And talk about lean, this system idles at only 80 megabytes of RAM. - Toshibi, on 12/15/2007, -1/+14Your OS has spyware? Very secure.
- ryker, on 12/15/2007, -3/+14Pretty lame linux article. VERY basic stuff. The only thing worthwhile on the list that everyone might not already know is changing swapiness.
- schestowitz, on 12/15/2007, -11/+19There's also the option of getting a lighter distribution that is tweaked in this way 'out of the box'. There are several.
- reversekilled, on 12/15/2007, -0/+8I like the tips in this article. Randomly kill processes! Randomly install new ones! Turn off the swap file! I'm sure you'll learn a lot from fixing your machine in the aftermath of reading this article.
- Diggingspoon, on 12/15/2007, -5/+13Terrible, worthless blogspam.
Their advice mostly boils down to "Use command-line and less featureful programs instead of good ones" - felch, on 12/15/2007, -0/+7Need to definitely agree with an above poster. There's no reason to remove those TTYs. They don't bog down the system in the slightest and it was probably some lame trick someone told them as a joke.
- gordmoo, on 12/15/2007, -1/+8how about not using compiz? o_O
- dinostabOMG, on 12/15/2007, -1/+7Thanks for the answer. It always amazes me how hostile digg is to honestly asked questions.
- fr34k5h0w, on 12/15/2007, -0/+6No way. Not without -RF instead of -R. Otherwise the fun stuff won't occur. BTW for anyone who doesn't know, don't try this on a production machine. And if you do at least get a video of you doing it and post it to YouTube so we can watch and laugh.
- subgeniusd, on 12/15/2007, -0/+6Startup time? What startup? I just log off and leave my systems on for months. When needing the occasional restarts so what is an extra 1/2 minute? Average modern computers running Linux are far beyond the need for any performance tweaking. (and I know all about XP performance tweaks which do make a big difference).
- xutopia, on 12/15/2007, -1/+7For those poor people trying this out the command will erase everything on your hard drive.
- monkeyboy7706, on 12/15/2007, -1/+7Whats wrong with swappiness? I think its very descriptive to what it does even if its not a real word. You just try and come up with one word that it better.
- alex4u2nv, on 12/15/2007, -0/+5http://www.toms.net/rb/
Functionality vs Slimmer/Leaner is relative to usage, and a lot of times get out of hand, with most of us missing the point.
Software and Computers are tools for automating the job, and offload the work from us, onto the systems resources.
So what do you want to do? Do the work for the computer, or let the computer do it for you? Is the question most of these tweakers should ask. Instead of performance tweaks, we should investigate more automation tweaks.
For example.
Click a button. runs ./takeoverworld.sh
while I go to the bar with some friends. - trvr, on 12/15/2007, -2/+7This has always bugged me. I always saw Linux as this "free" and nice community; but I can now see that there are ***** in every community. It's almost like they don't want other people to use Linux. Who cares what distro people are using; at least it isn't Windows..
- Toshibi, on 12/15/2007, -0/+5Damn Small Linux is okay but it's a dependency hell. So much so, that on a recent ancient laptop that I purchased, I ended up having to hack the ***** out of it to get Xubuntu on there. Much happier with the Xub.
- Myztry, on 12/15/2007, -0/+5It's the difference between someone go to the gym so as to fit into 'off the shelf' clothes, and someone going to the gym to get muscle definition.
- mutt, on 12/15/2007, -0/+5These Linux tweakers crack me up due to the amount of crack they smoke. Lack of understanding is not a tweak, and its not Windows Vista. Some of the comments, IMO are correct. If you are THAT low on resources, run something lean. Running bloated software and turning off services isn't going to help.
Swapiness isn't a huge deal, its not like Linux does a bad job of swapping in the first place.. you wouldn't ever notice a difference, in fact, you may do more harm than good if you don't know why/what you are changing.
Also, one would wonder how a random blogger knows more about swapping than a kernel developer. The wonders of the Internet.
Seriously, I have a tweak for Linux. Its worked for me for years. Avoid Redhat and SuSE..
Start lean, and build up. Ubuntu Server, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, ArchLinux, etc.. Just build up as you need, its not like apt, emerge, yum, etc is difficult.
Of course, Redhat may be unavoidable at work... - sej7278, on 12/15/2007, -0/+5not exactly "l337" tips were they? removing tty's and using abiword!
the best thing to do is stop useless services like avahi, sendmail, etc that a lot of distros like to start by default.
turn off the bling - is compiz fusion really neccesary - and its going to suck on a pc that you have performance worries about anyway.
i'm writing this on my 3ghz p4ht with 3gb ram, not wonderfully powerful by today's standards, but i've got winxp in a vmware machine using a gig (running my vpn), i'm playing a movie in mplayer, surfing with firefox and gkrellm is saying no more than 7% cpu is being used.
yesterday i was running vm's of winxp (transcoding a dvd), solaris (testing software raid) and on the linux host i was wordprocessing, surfing, chatting, emailing etc. all with no lag.
do we really need performance howto's? go help some vista users or people with pentium2's.
jesus i can never read these captchas and what is it with the double spacing?! - Bamborzled, on 12/15/2007, -0/+5You sound like someone from Geek Squad who would charge people $30 to install iTunes.
- mercurysquad, on 12/15/2007, -0/+4Coming from an Ubuntu world, I can confirm the above ^ Arch is pretty much as snappy as you can get. I have only 512 MB of RAM and my swap partition is always sitting at 0 MB used unless I *try* to load my system. Then it goes up to a few MB's.
- tvanwyk, on 12/15/2007, -0/+3Gonna explain, or just scream?
- arjie, on 12/15/2007, -2/+5These tweaks aren't new. There was one original article that's been here ages ago that these are being sourced from, the ideas are all identical. In fact, a hundred articles have just gotten the ideas from that one article and kept repeating them and landed on digg.
In any case, I'll tell you one thing, reduce your swappiness, but retain a swap file, even if you're an average user. I use less than 800MB at any point of time and so I decided not to have a swap partition at all, but one day firefox went berserk and locked up my computer. I couldn't kill it because there was no memory left, but Ctrl-Alt-Backspace worked and all was well again. Lesson learnt, I'll repartition my drive when I install Ubuntu 8.04 and get it right this time. - hyperair, on 12/15/2007, -1/+4Use GDM of course. Or console into the computer via serial cable =P
- oobuntu, on 12/15/2007, -1/+4Think carefully before changing swappiness. Each system has different characteristics and uses. You could really change things for the worse.
- init100, on 12/15/2007, -0/+3"Randomly kill processes!"
Well, turning off the ISDN service and the Bluetooth service on a system with neither isn't going to hurt, and will bring a slight decrease to startup time. There are other services that you can turn off. If you aren't going to run an NFS server, you can turn off the port mapper and the rpc* services, etc. - trogdoor, on 12/17/2007, -0/+3No, it wouldn't. Because the number you are entering is neither a percentage nor is it a value of usage.
- Awap, on 12/15/2007, -0/+3Changing swappiness is not necessarily good: In most modern OSs, including Linux, mapped memory (e.g. program heap, program code) share your ram with file cache. Setting a low swappiness means that Linux preferentially gives RAM to mapped pages instead of unmapped pages, the assumption being that mapped memory is used more.
However, this is not necessarily true. As this article points out, there are many background tasks on your computer that are used very rarely. Ideally you would like them to be swapped out to make more room for your files that are not mapped, like documents, game data, et cetera. By setting a low swappiness, background tasks will take precedence over files unless your system becomes very low on memory. - CaptainHarlock, on 12/16/2007, -0/+3Ubuntu and Linux are two names that are not interchangeable.
Make you UBUNTU system leaner with 10 tweaks. - arjie, on 12/15/2007, -0/+3I like compiz, things seem smoother. Even when programs have died, I can still move windows around without any trouble. I get tearing otherwise.
- andycr512, on 12/15/2007, -0/+3Compiz has very, very little impact on anything but the GPU. In fact, it normally cuts load from the CPU.
- beermad, on 12/16/2007, -0/+2That's certainly what it seems to have done on my system since I enabled it. My machine *seems* significantly more responsive than it was beforehand, suggesting that a lot of CPU was being used on the display beforehand. And that's despite having reverted to the stock Ubuntu kernel rather than the heavily-optimised one I had been using.
- whodathunk, on 12/16/2007, -0/+2Reducing swappiness is a bad choice imho. There are lots of pages that are never used and not swapping them out reduces the amount of file buffer and cache available to the system, making everything else slower.
- xutopia, on 12/15/2007, -1/+3Hey not everyone is at your level yet. Lots of people are booting Linux for the first time.
- clos, on 12/16/2007, -0/+2archlinux ftw ftw ftw!!!
- idntunknwn, on 12/15/2007, -0/+2I've always wondered, how much of a difference does swappiness actually make? Anyone got experience?
- whodathunk, on 12/16/2007, -0/+2reducing swappiness reduces the amount of memory available for file cache and buffers. You choose...
- cdmarcus, on 12/15/2007, -0/+2Seriously, comparing Epiphany to Dillo? Come on. Epiphany is hardly a step down from Firefox. It's faster, supports extensions (but doesn't have Firefox's vast library of them), has a Places-like bookmark system... you can install versions of Adblock, mouse gestures, greasemonkey, etc.
- ramvi, on 12/16/2007, -0/+1Totem will play everything. You just need the codecs:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras - inactive, on 12/15/2007, -2/+3lol
- tvanwyk, on 12/15/2007, -0/+1"Also, one would wonder how a random blogger knows more about swapping than a kernel developer. The wonders of the Internet."
In all fairness, the folks at Lifehacker are a little more than "random bloggers," but point definitely taken. If you have to swap a lot, you've already lost the speed battle, as I've been known to say before. - tvanwyk, on 12/16/2007, -0/+1You really are a flamebot.
OS X uses the BSD kernel. BSD is not Linux. Therefore, OS X is not a Linux distro. - adenbley, on 12/16/2007, -1/+2you're joking right?
- drader, on 12/16/2007, -0/+1Its a little dated, but if you want to trim your box more see this guide: http://lightningcrash.blogspot.com/2007/08/making- ...
Yes, it is geared towards ubuntu as well, however you can infer a lot from it. - ebullit, on 12/20/2007, -0/+1Linux from scratch is a real good way to make a lean system.
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