Rick Rosinski wrote:
> 
> 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?
Hi,
I found this command called hdparm that looks at your hard disk. I found
that my drive had buffering off and Direct Memory Access(DMA) turned
off. I don't know what to do armed with this but ...

You could also look at www.linuxdoc.org. They have a section
HOWTO/Multi-Disk-HOWTO.html that tells how to optimize if you have more
than disk.

Hope this helps,
Eric:-)