What is Digg?26 Comments
- flood6, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Using that rationale, you lucky Windows users only have to tweak your machines once every 10 years.
- Corgana, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9For a second I was thinking "it's about time something other than a "tweak your windows guide" didn't make it to the frontpage.
Then I remembered exactly WHY Linux needs so few tweak guides. - immure, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I remember when only intelligent people used linux, now we need performance tuning guides?
If you're that fanatical about getting every ounce of juice out of your box, then you should be a Gentoo-er http://www.gentoo.org/. Read the forums and wiki, there are many performance tweaks there.
(P.S. I use Ubuntu, and hey, it runs fast enough) - Xiol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4top sucks - what you need is htop
emerge htop (Gentoo)
apt-get install htop (Ubuntu)
http://htop.sourceforge.net/ - tupuli, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Other than enabling DMA via hdparm (usually enabled by default) there's nothing here that is useful. Sorry folks, reducing the number of terminals from 6 to 3 isn't going to do wonders for you Linux box.
Most distros (e.g. Ubuntu) should have frequency scaling enabled out of the box. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Linux is fun to use.
- Xiol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2To be fair, I never really noticed a difference between non-prelinked and a prelinked Gentoo system.
I've got a 2.53GHz P4 with a gig of RAM, and after prelinking I really didn't notice a difference to KDE 3.5/Firefox load times on my box. I mean, yeah, I may have shaved a second off somewhere, but it wasn't anything _noticable_. - flood6, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I can see your point, but not all Linux users are hobbyists that can choose what distro they want to use. Companies may be standardized on Red Hat because "ProductX" will only support Red Hat and SUSE. I'll mostly agree that "big time" Linux admins should already know how to tweak their machines, but there may be small companies in this situation where the admin just happened to be a programmer or some other "tech guy" that drew the "shortest straw" and got the job. I'll admit that may be a small number of people. Additionally, even average users may not like Gentoo, but strongly prefer their distro of choice for any number of reasons, but still want a little more performance. Hell, it's a decent concept just for the learning experience it provides intermediate users like myself.
That said, I have to agree with an earlier comment that the tips in this article aren't really going to produce that much of a performance boost, but I'd still love to see more articles like this. - ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Site has been dugg.
Anyone have a mirror? - Deusiah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1InitNG is the best tool for bootup speed increases I have seen so far.
- blackphiber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/Swappiness
play around and try different swappinesses for yourself. I run at 15 and things do seem a bit zippier and much less swapping stuff out. little controversty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory#Swapping_in_the_Linux_operating_system
totally checkout the CK patchset, wonder when/if it will ever get into the mainline kernel...
http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/ - c0uchm0nster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1initng is super for those people running a million and one services as startup, but turning off services you don't need/want speeds up system performance AFTER boot as well. Besides, when I first heard about initng and saw everyone on the gentoo forums bragging about "my system boots in 18 seconds now!" and such, I wasn't very impressed. My gentoo box is over a year old, has its fair share of services, and boots to the kde3.5.1 login prompt in under 30 seconds - I don't know if this is out of character for a sysv system, but I do no bootup tweaks (turning off things you don't use is NOT a tweak), or any other kind of tweaking for that matter.
By the way, I did end up trying out initng on that system (trying to troubleshoot a 2-4 minute boot time that was caused by bad ram in the last ~150mb of my 1gig... turning off himem support fixed that in a jiffy). After fixing the himem problem, the initng only took about 3-4 seconds off my boot time.
And about linux "tweaking" in general, I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do, since in most cases you have to enable the extra things that aren't widely used yourself - as opposed to windows where everything runs by default (granted I'm not sure about this behavior in ubuntu, I never spent the time learning it enough to like it). - Deusiah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Great prog! Thanks for the link.
- sbutcher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0A useful tool to use is sysv-rc-conf
*Ubuntu users can get this by typing apt-get install sysv-rc-conf
This allows you to remove unused services, and will vastly improve your boot time, and release precious RAM to the user. - flump, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Frequency scaling makes your system slower though. It's only good for keeping your system "Cool'n Quiet". I use it myself application start-up is noticably slower
- sovietninja, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Where can i find a copy of Lucky Windows? I just have Windows XP. I like getting tweaked.
- Cyrack, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1If just he had written about prelinking.
Prelinking is probably the most effective way to make your Linux run faster compared to the amount of work needed.
For the average gentoo-box:
emerge prelink
prelink -avmR
and you are done. Just run prelink -avmR after every update/emerge - jcmia1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Overall a comprehensive page for Linux operating system tuning. Nothing specific to applications that may run on Linux, though. If you are into short and sweet tuning tips on Linux, aix, Windows, and Solaris for cpu, memory, network, and disk io, I recommend this site: http://www.performancewiki.com
- saranagati, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0couldn't agree more, the only part of the article which was useful at all was the hdparm part and even that didn't show what the different dma settings are or the few other hdparm options that could be benificial. Totally useless article, but its about what i'd expect from the people at linuxforums.org
- ddig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The ext3 file system is very slow (but secure). The one performance trick for linux that I can think of right now would be to use e.g. xfs instead. I'll phrase this tip as a question here however, since I'm not sure if it would be a good idea after all. Perhaps someone with more experience in this could join in.
So: linux gurus, which file system for which partition on the system? - alikins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hmm, not that impressive of an article. Seems to repeat a fair number of "old wives tail", that tend to have minimal impact on performance.
One day, when I'm bored, I'm going to update http://people.redhat.com/alikins/system_tuning.html to be relevant again. But I rarely have to deal with those sort of issues anymore, so I'm not well versed in the area. Maybe I should just make it into a wiki, especially now the old linuxperf.linux.nl seems to have gone away. That approach worked a bit with http://www.linuxtroubleshooting.com which is similar. - lacteus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Wow !
Htop is really useful, thanks ! - dougmc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0top doesn't suck just because something `new' has come out that does almost exactly the same thing -- but in color.
htop looks like an incremental improvement to top in a few areas (and a step backwards in a few areas -- for example, the colors seem nonsensical in some places), but it doesn't make top suck.
(Though being able to scroll through the process list is definately nice.) - mordain, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0OK for noobs, where's all the good stuff?
- Deusiah, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Go back to Windows then, we don't want you :P
- STKD, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2"Tune the Performance of your Linux System..."
Then do it again in a couple of weeks when a new distro is out.
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