Making things faster!

[VivianLee]

Alrighty. I run sidux on my HP Pavillion, which is basically a slightly more polished version of Debian unstable (we use the same config files and repos, so there isn't too much different). I plan to reinstall with vanilla Debian unstable later this week, however.

I was wonder what tips users could offer to make my system faster? Granted, it's already super-speedy because 1) Debian is fast, 2) sidux is faster, and 3) I'm a minimalist so I've disabled effects, only have the bare minimum of software, etc. However, I still don't like the boot time (30 seconds) and things just -feel- a lot slower than they should. Anyone have some tips in general to get things speedier?

[sarlacii]

LOL You sound like you already have it pretty sorted... but I notice that the only realistic way (?) to get speedy boot times is to go the Apple-way, and load the GUI as soon as possible, then let the rest of the system apps catch up.

You could try shutting off services that are not required... just be careful of nuking something that you need! LOL

What I like about the Linux way, is that once everything is loaded post boot and you're at the X login, you do not face a 5 minute wait (ala Windows) while all your stuff loads after you login. In Linux everything is pretty much there already, so when you login, bang, up comes your GUI (esp. with something like xfce).

[reed9]

I haven't tried either of these, but you could look into prefetch or readahead

This article should be applicable to Debian as well.

You can get a small speed increase by disabling auto-detection/loading of modules and explicitly defining what you want to load. Unfortunately, I only know how to do it in Arch.


Another Arch specific speed boost guide. Presumably there is an equivalent in Debian.

And of course, compiling your own kernel with needed modules built in and unnecessary stuff removed.
http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/K...ild-HOWTO.html

[monday90]

I presume this would work with Sidux, I use it to improve boot times in Lenny. In a text editor open /etc/init.d/rc and at around line 31 change:

CONCURRENCY=none

to:

CONCURRENCY=shell

I found it drops boot times by about 25-30%

Hope this helps.

[TechShui]

How fast is your hard drive?

If you have a 5400RPM, and upgrade that to a 7200RPM, that's a 33% increase.

Hard prices have fallen a lot this year, you can probably find a 120GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive for around $20 online.

[jonantice]

Thanks in part to work done by the Ubuntu people boot times will be improving across most Linux distros over the next year (if they adopt what Ubuntu has done). Debian unstable is usually on par with Ubuntu as far as new features so I would expect to see the Ubuntu boot-time improvements in unstable by Ubuntu's next release. I've found that the easiest solution to many things in Linux is to wait 6 months and try again.