Speeding up Debain

**nvbauer** · 12-29-2004

Hi all,

I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 Laptop, 3 GHz P4, 512MD DDR and a 7200 RPM HD, The HD was the deal maker for me.

I installed Debian unstable and all is working, but it is slow. Apps are slow to start, GNOME and KDE start slow. Actually it runs about as fast or just a little bit faster than my 533 Celeron Optiplex 100.

I've shut off most unneeded services i.e; exim4, NetATalk, and the like. I suspect that what is really makeing it run slow is Debian is optimized for i386. So what I am asking is for is suggestions on where to look about optimizing my kernel, and anything else to get this bad boy laptop to run at full speed.

I tried Yoper for a week and it ran a whole lot faster than Debian, but it's not anything close to as powerul (interms of available applications, support, and stability) as Debian.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Norm

**kriss** · 12-29-2004

Check out ubuntu. Its build off Debian and thus uses the apt-tool to fetch software and such.

Or you can try to re-build gnome or kde, or whatever you use as that might speed up things (optimizing and such).

Good luck

**Vergil83** · 12-29-2004

have you tried hdparm? IIRC, one reason why yoper is faster is because it is enabled by default.

**nvbauer** · 12-29-2004

Thanks folks for the sugestions. I'll give hdparm a try and see if that helps. I've heard about Ubunto, I'll look into that too.

**nvbauer** · 12-31-2004

Well, I did some tweaking with hdparm. With some help from this article http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/...29/hdparm.html and some googleing I discovered that I have a Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200 RPM hard drive.

using these paramaters in /etc/hdparm.conf

Code:

hdparm -A1 -d1 -Xudma13 -c1 -m16 /dev/hda

I was able to eek out a little more speed. I don't know that much about hardrive technology to realy milk it, but maybe someone else might post a better hdparm to pass.

Thanks again for the suggestion of using hdparm.

Open Source Rocks !!!

Norm

**Vergil83** · 12-31-2004

i have always just used

Code:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

(I think I got it from a search on this forum

)

**sarumont** · 12-31-2004

You can also try prelinking your larger apps so they start more quickly. KDE, Gnome, OOo, etc. are much improved by a good prelink.

**nvbauer** · 01-01-2005

Prelink, I have never heard of that before. Could you post a link or two where I can get some info on that.

Thanks again,

**ewanrg** · 01-01-2005

Just out of curiosity, what are you using for a swap partition? It may be that you need a little more swap space to keep things from swapping in and out too often.

Of course if you don't have any swap partition, that may also be the problem

---

Yup, I'm one of those blog people

**sarumont** · 01-05-2005

Originally Posted by nvbauer

Prelink, I have never heard of that before. Could you post a link or two where I can get some info on that.

Thanks again,

Here's the Homepage from the prelink ebuild:

ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/prelink

Basically what it does is link all the shared libraries to a program statically so that when the program is started, it doesn't have to search/load the libraries: it has them already. This speeds up larger programs that use a lot of shared libraries.

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