George, Thanks alot for your advice.

I just have a couple of questions.

> I suggest ensuring your kernel loads the UDMA-66 driver (SuSE does,
> RH and Mandrake do not, I don't know about Slack).  

Where can I find info on the UDMA-66 driver?  I have customized my Slackware 
system so much now that any default configuration assumptions don't apply 
anymore.  I am am using 7.1 (or what was 7.1 until I upgraded lots of system 
tools and utilities just to get Kernel 4.1 off the ground).

 > Next, try mounting your partitions so they do not track atime.  I read

would I find this in "man mount"?  Where can I find info about disabling 
"atime"?

Thanks alot for your advice.

>
> 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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>
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-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com