But, what about the benchmark tests that yielded the same results?  Would I 
be wasting time putting the hdparm commands in the start-up scripts?

On Saturday 17 February 2001 09:04, you wrote:
> I use hdparm on the hard drives.
>
> command is like this:
> /sbin/hdparm -c3 (turns on 32 bit transfers)
>
> I put ithis command in one of the base init scripts, so that
> it gets started early in the process (like immediately after kernel
> loading).
>
> generally, it does make some noticeable improvements in how fast programs
> like X and netscape load.
>
> Hawke
>
> On Fri, 16 February 2001, 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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> >
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-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com