Speeding up a machine
Scott Oertel
freebsd at scottevil.com
Sun Mar 11 09:35:01 CDT 2007
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
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