Any ways to speed up linux?

[Paul Dickson]

About the only thing that might help is setting your motherboard for
"Write-Behind" for the K6 cache (the default is "Write-Through" which
is what's done by Pentiums).  This will give some improvement
especially if you're running code that stays in the CPU's cache.

Perhaps it's time to upgrade to an Athlon or Duron...  The K6 doesn't
have the best FPU.  It falls somewhere between the Pentium and Pentium
Pro family (PPro, PII, and PIII) for clock cycles/FPU instruction.  So
encoding MP3s or anything heavily using the FPU is going to be slow.

FPU-wise, the K6-3 450MHz was slightly slower than my notebook's
300Mhz Pentium II.  A K6-3 475 might have been about equal.  This is
based on running seti@home.

I running Linux on my notebook, a 300Mhz Pentium II.  It doesn't seem
slow to me, but when had to reload RedHat 6.2 last month, I logged
into my file server (a 900MHz Athlon, formerly a K6-3 450MHz, formerly
a K6-2 300MHz :-) and Netscape was damn fast. :-) You must have gotten
the taste for speed from somewhere...


Sorry if I'm coming into this thread in the middle.  I just discovered
today that messages from this mailing list had been disabled for me
(and had been for several months).  Just to confuse things, I would
occasionally receive one or two messages about once a month, so I
thought this list was dead rather the me being turned off.

	-Paul

On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, 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?
> 
> >
> > * 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.