I came across a page from the TvEase wiki the other day via Digg which specified a few tweaks on how to make Ubuntu speedier. As far as I can tell, they mostly do a few things like toning down memory swapping to disk (hmm, academically that kind of seems like a fundamental algorithm problem to me, but at least it’s adjustable), disabling IPv6 support, taking advantage of multi-threaded processors to thread init scripts at boot-up, changing various low level networking options, and changing the way which data is written and cataloged in the ext3 file system.
I finally got around to applying them earlier this evening to my workstation and here is what I’ve noticed thus far:
- Boot-up time seems to be about the same. Granted, I’m on a fairly old workstation which has one of the Intel “hyperthreading” processors circa summer of 2003, so I didn’t really expect it to work anyway.
- Browsing the internet has sped-up signifcantly! My geek-o-meter would guess that it’s about 200-300% faster now! For instance, I can literally load the front page of this site in as little as 1.2 seconds (according to Fasterfox) when I type in the URL
- Multitasking seems to be much better, applications start a bit faster, and I never hear the “clank clank clank” of the OS paging out to disk
I’d highly recommend giving these changes a try on your Ubuntu system. Additionally, I would surmise that the boot-up time improves drastically on dual core machines. Personally I’m holding-out on buying a new workstation until the quad core machines are available at a reasonable price which is why my workstation is so antiquated.
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I run MEPIS, which is a direct offshoot of Ubuntu, on a new machine with an AMD dual-core processor. Having a dual-core, I thought I’d try the tweak that supposedly takes advantage of it by modifying /etc/init.d/rc to set Concurrency=shell. That “tweak” made my system unbootable. It kept restarting GRUB after it was 25% through the boot process. Fortunately, I was able to rescue my system using the SimplyMEPIS Live CD by logging in as root and setting Concurrency=none. That’s one of the nice thing about MEPIS — it allows you to fix things you screw up.
Bottom line: I wouldn’t try any of the other “improvements” mentioned in that article, nor would I recommend them to anyone else.
Given your configuration, I’d say it’s probably an isolated case. Honestly it seems like Linux hasn’t been very friendly to AMD lately, so I’ve been back in Intel-land for the past several years.
I just tried CONCURRENCY=SHELL on my AMD Athlon64 3500+ box with Biostar GeForce 6100AM2… seems to work fine, even after I did the latest grub update… it’s booting noticeably faster.
I also have a LiveCD within reach and a note posted around my computer on how to undo this change if the box does start hanging on boot.
Grrr, link http://tvease.net/wiki/index.p....._for_speed doesn’t work, can you give us alternative link ?:-)
You’re right Pawel, it looks like the company who ran that site has filed for bankruptcy and shut it down. I’ll try and post some sort of update soon.
new link:
http://www.salatti.net/tweak-ubuntu-for-speed/
1.2 seconds to load this page, wow thats SLOW, LOL. My pc loads this page in .120 seconds or 120ms. Thats what the fasterfox page load timer says any way. I am on Linux Mint 5LTS.
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