Any ways to speed up linux?

[Rick Rosinski]

My CPU is an AMD K6-III 400Mhz.  I just want to get the best out of Linux 
(plus I like to tinker with it).  I am using Slackware 7.1 (but I updated 
many of the basic utilities and upgraded the kernel to 2.4.1).  I haven't 
changed anything related to the disk cache and mem buffer (because I don't 
know how to).  I am afraid of messing with RAM disks only because I tend to 
forget to copy things back to disk to save important info (but of course, I 
can implement shut-down or crontab scripts that will do that for me).  I use 
my system for web administration, with apache, perl and mysql. I also work 
with large 600 bpi photo images with the gimp.  I do lots of work with sound 
files, especially encoding wav's to mp3's.   Is there a way to decrease the 
amount of caching that the system does?   I also tried hdparm -c3d1 and found 
that my system defaults to 32-bit & dma mode because there was no difference 
in the benchmark tests (using hdparm -Tt on the drive before and after the 
-c3d1 switch).  Any more suggestions?

On Saturday 17 February 2001 15:31, you wrote:
> You failed to mention your CPU.  What seems slow to you?
> Actions like starting up Mozilla?  How is your 400M of
> RAM being used?  Is it mostly disk cache, or are you running
> a large database server?  In general, this is probably not
> a good idea (iow you should just let Unix' disk caching
> do its thing), but if, for example, you wanted Mozilla to
> load faster (and you have plenty of free RAM), you could
> create a RAM disk, copy all of the Mozilla stuff to
> the RAM disk, and run it from the RAM disk.
>
> Another option if you have a 486 or Pentium* CPU would
> be to recompile everything with gcc's -m486 to optimize
> the code for a 486 instead of a 386.  I don't know if there's
> a similar parameter to optimize for Pentium instead of
> 486 or 386.
>
> There's a distro (Mandrake, I think) that offers both
> i386 and i586 RPMs.  If you have a Pentium*, use the
> i586 RPMs.
>
> Else, you could try FreeBSD!  :)
>
>
> D
>
> * On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 01:38:08AM +0000, Rick Rosinski wrote:
> > I don't mean to be long-winded, I just want to know if anybody had found
> > any tricks that makes a noticable difference in the speed of linux
> >
> > I am looking for any way to speed up linux.  I have upgraded to the 2.4
> > kernel, and boot time takes less time.  Great.  If it improves the speed
> > (and smoothness) of programs in run-time, those hard drives are holding
> > them back. So, I checked out some old PLUG mail and found stuff about the
> > hdparm utility (from "linux too slow") and I gave that a shot.  I found
> > out that my drives were already running in 32-bit mode - because the
> > benchmark tests yielded the same results.  I used "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda"
> > to test the drive. Then, I did a "hdparm -c3d1 /dev/hda".  This said that
> > 32-bit dma was activated.  Then I did hte hdparm -Tt /dev/hda again and
> > the results were the same.  I have 400 MB ram and two swap partitions
> > totalling 267,544 MB, and the swap is hardly ever used (using "free" and
> > "kpm" (KDE Process Manager)). I tried to upgrade to XFree86 4.0.2, but
> > the compilation forced out a kernel bug in inode.c and that is too scary
> > to try again (since inode.c is part of the file management system) - and
> > a crash that forced me to reformat a partition.
> >
> > --
> > Rick Rosinski
> > http://rickrosinski.com
> > rick@rickrosinski.com
>
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-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com