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
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