Hi Rick,

I suggest ensuring your kernel loads the UDMA-66 driver (SuSE does,
RH and Mandrake do not, I don't know about Slack).  This alone helped
me increase my data transfer rate from 2MB/sec to 8MB/sec.

Next, try mounting your partitions so they do not track atime.  I read
about a month ago that this will help quite a bit, but I have not
tried it.

George


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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