Arch Linux

raptir

Member

Registered: 2009-09-16

Posts: 31

Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

I've installed Arch on my Asus eee 1000 (8GB + 32GB SSDs). So far, I've done the following tweaks:

- Move /var/log, /var/tmp and /tmp to RAM (tmpfs)
- Moved the Firefox disk cache to a tmpfs (which might be silly, as I could just disable it and let it use the RAM cache)
- Switched the scheduler to deadline (I did this by adding it to the kernel line. Is there a way to do this automatically for each drive individually? I do use an external HDD often)

Is there anything else I can do that will either reduce wear and tear on my SSD or increase performance?

Also, as a side note, when my PC is booting and logging into my account automatically (through having x:5:once:/bin/su PREFERED_USER -l -c "/bin/bash --login" in my inittab), I get some weird message that pops up right as it's logging me in, but goes away before I can read it. It does not occur if I'm not logging in automatically. Where would this message be logged? I've looked through /var/log and couldn't find anything...

MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

What comes to my mind is to reduce the swappiness of the system. While searching for an appropriate article, I found this one:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Max … erformance

It contains several performance techniques and also a section on SSD's. Hope that helps.

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

You might be interested in compcache.

-edit-

Yeah, it's in that wiki article linked above.

Last edited by lucke (2009-10-29 17:47:00)

raptir

Member

Registered: 2009-09-16

Posts: 31

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

I actually decided to not use a swap partition. When I used Xubuntu, I dropped Swappiness to 1, but it never swapped. I have 2GB of RAM, so I don't know what I could possibly do in Xfce that would exceed that.

EDIT: I decided to install SLiM, and that solved all my funky errors on start/shutdown. Also, Compcache looks promising as a back-up in case I exceed my available RAM. Will that work even if I have no swap partition?

Last edited by raptir (2009-10-30 02:04:58)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

Yeah, compcache can work without swap partition - in that case all swap stuff is kept in RAM, otherwise incompressible stuff is pushed to the disk.

Incidentally, I set swappiness to 100 on all my machines - unused stuff gets pushed to the swap over time and just stays there; always some gained megabytes for the caches with minimal cost.

foutrelis

Developer

From: Athens, Greece

Registered: 2008-07-28

Posts: 705

Website

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

Is there anything else I can do that will either reduce wear and tear on my SSD or increase performance?

I use the tmpfs trick you mention and the deadline scheduler on my netbook. Furthermore, I make use of the ext2 filesystem (I had to restore a couple of files from the lost+found directory after one or two abnormal shutdowns, but there haven't been any major issues with it) and have set the noatime option in /etc/fstab.

I doubt there's much more you can do on the OS level to extend the life expectancy of your SSD (which, I may add, shouldn't wear out very easily).

raptir

Member

Registered: 2009-09-16

Posts: 31

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

I know lifetime of the SSD shouldn't be a major issue, but I'd still like to maximize it.

Also, are there any better/lighter weight/faster power management tools than xfce4-power-manager? I've noticed that starting it takes up nearly half of my xfce4 start time, but I still want to be able to see my battery status/control power saving options easily.

Edit: One last thing. I've read two different tutorials for switching a directory to tmpfs. One said to add:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

The other said to add:

none /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Is there any real difference? Also, what do the last two numbers do? most tutorials have said to use 0 0, but Arch set them up as 0 1.

Last edited by raptir (2009-10-30 22:22:12)

raptir

Member

Registered: 2009-09-16

Posts: 31

Re: Arch on a SSD: What else can I do?

I had one other question. I switched to using Deadline for the increase in SSD performance. i do not have any internal HDDs, but I do have an external that I use primarily for large files/MP3s. I take it that I wouldn't be suffering a huge performance hit with that on the hard drive due to the primarily large files?