Arch Linux

PrimoTurbo

Member

Registered: 2008-06-26

Posts: 109

Website

Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

I would like this thread to be dedicated to various speed up techniques and performance tweaks for Linux and especially arch.

K.Mandla offers quite a bit of interesting tweaks in the guide "Howto: Set up Hardy for speed", most of it applies to all linux distros.
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/05/04 … for-speed/

If you have come across any interesting information relating to getting faster and better performance from Linux please do not hesitate to post. Thanks.

Acecero

Member

Registered: 2008-06-21

Posts: 1,373

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

There were threads about speeding up the boot process.

You might want to check them out.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=49323

PrimoTurbo

Member

Registered: 2008-06-26

Posts: 109

Website

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

I've seen them this thread is not about the boot process, for I see limited value to increasing boot speed. I'm talking about general desktop speed increase, because I'm sure most people spend more time using the computer then booting it. Especially if it's a desktop computer.

Acecero

Member

Registered: 2008-06-21

Posts: 1,373

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

Well you should have been more specific in your topic... Not my problem, jeez...

Sp4rkR4t

Member

From: Southampton

Registered: 2008-05-06

Posts: 110

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

Best way to speed up your desktop is to keep it light and don't load crap you don't use. End of discussion and I would have thought fairly bleeding obvious to anyone using Arch.

Square

Member

Registered: 2008-06-11

Posts: 435

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

Making your packages optimized more specifically for your hardware may increase system performance.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Safe_Cflags

Other than using more lightweight alternative solutions, I'm not sure there is much you can do to drastically improve system performance short of simply upgrading hardware.

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PrimoTurbo

Member

Registered: 2008-06-26

Posts: 109

Website

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

Of course one of the best methods is using software that is low on resources.

So for example running Openbox (or another light DE) instead of Gnome/KDE will obviously increase your performance.
Running Thunar or PCman instead of say Nautilus or Konquere.
Leafpad or Mousepad instead of Gedit.
I find that running a music daemon allows for faster playback, so something like mpd and sonata provides good sound playback and speed.
SMplayer has a nice interface and in my opinion performs better then VLC or most other video players.

pheon

Member

From: Berlin, Germany

Registered: 2008-05-14

Posts: 91

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

Tuning Arch for Speed in Wiki

Flying with Gentoo
Point 6,11,13,15 are not Gentoo-only stuff

Kernel 2.6 Performance guide from Gentooboard

NTLP

KDE Performance

EXT3 tuning

ReiserFS tuning

My bookmarks. Sometimes redundant information.

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watching someone else use your computer is like watching a drunk orangutan solve a rubix cube

catwell

Member

From: Bretagne, France

Registered: 2008-02-20

Posts: 207

Website

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

Best way to speed up your desktop is to keep it light and don't load crap you don't use. End of discussion and I would have thought fairly bleeding obvious to anyone using Arch.

So for example running Openbox (or another light DE) instead of Gnome/KDE will obviously increase your performance.

Now this is partly wrong and a lot of people seem to not understand this. Actually, if you need software depending on QT, using KDE will make it launch faster because its libs will already be loaded. You trade speed at boot for responsiveness at execution by preloading libraries.

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

kde-preload does that... Technically you could use it with Openbox.

Anyway, I'll second the one on ext3 tuning. Directory indexing makes pacman noticably faster.

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

I would like this thread to be dedicated to various speed up techniques and performance tweaks for Linux and especially arch.

K.Mandla offers quite a bit of interesting tweaks in the guide "Howto: Set up Hardy for speed", most of it applies to all linux distros.
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/05/04 … for-speed/

If you have come across any interesting information relating to getting faster and better performance from Linux please do not hesitate to post. Thanks.

You will most likely end up wasting a lot of time for very little gain.
There are no miracle solutions, you either use faster apps or buy faster hardware.
The tweaks which are truly interesting without major drawbacks usually make their way on a default system, one way or another.
For example, for directory index on ext3 :
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ext … ystem_Tips : "Note: Directory indexing is activated by default in Archlinux via /etc/mke2fs.conf"

So if you want an advice, there are areas more interesting to explore, like programming for instance. You might end up having the capability to really improve apps performance, or write your own lighter alternatives.

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

czar

Member

Registered: 2008-03-08

Posts: 115

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

What about pre-loading some of the most used binaries onto a ram disk? (or the pacman cache for example)

B-Con

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2007-12-17

Posts: 554

Website

Re: Best methods to speed up and increase performance of Linux?

EXT3 tuning

I have to admit, I am quite surprised. I tested the various settings: I did a

$ time pacman -Qs >pacman-test

on a plain VC right after boot (so no hdd caching could begin to take place) with nothing special running.

On an ext3 with data=ordered resulted in a fraction over 19 seconds of wall time. With data=write-back and the noatime option it took 11.5 seconds of wall time. Very nice.

Disclaimer: Before I had the ext3 data=ordered mount option, and I don't know how it compares to the standard journal option speed-wise, so results may not be typical if its a noticeably slower option.

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- My AUR packages.