Preload rocks! Speed up your application launching with this.

Caleb Marcus caleb.marcus at gmail.com
Sun Oct 28 14:35:29 GMT 2007


I was IMing a friend who told me about preload, a daemon that figures
out which apps you use most and caches their executables and libraries
into RAM. Because GNOME login and application launch cause nonsequential
disk reads (and thus, a lot of seeks) it's extraordinarily helpful to
read in a bunch of libraries in advance, linearly, so that when you go
to launch the app, everything's already in RAM. I've installed it, and
it's drastically improved the time it takes to log into Gnome (I have a
lot of startup applicaitons), the time it takes to launch OpenOffice.org
(It's seriously about as fast as AbiWord now), and many other
applications. There's a blueprint on Launchpad to get preload integrated
into the default Ubuntu install, and I think it would be great if we
tried to get this done. Right now, there's only one subscriber to the
blueprint, so I don't think it's been noticed... but we can use our
numbers to try to get it out there to whoever matters.
If you want to see the speed increases I'm talking about, just do sudo
aptitude install preload to install it. You won't see speed increases
right away, but after a little bit of use, it'll figure out what you use
most and preload it into memory before you load the application, so
cold-start time will be greatly improved.
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