Preload rocks! Speed up your application launching with this.

[Aaron Haviland]

Caleb Marcus wrote, on Oct 28, 2007 at 10:35 EDT:
> 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.

Prelink, preload, prefetch, and readahead...

Some are more boot-specific (readahead and prefetch), some are aimed more
towards desktop/userspace (preload and prelink). 

It's my understanding that prefetch and readahead are incompatible with each
other (or at least just attempt to duplicate efforts).

I think it's a matter of which combination of these tools provide the best
'experience' without duplicating (and therefore slowing themselves down).

I haven't played with some of them in a while, and prefetch is completely new
to me, so I can't give any opinions on it. I do believe I've seen that
prefetch is planned to be standard in Hardy.

.....

I seem to have stopped typing this mid-thought, a couple days ago. Oh well,
I'm sure there's some good to come from sending it as is :)

-- 
Aaron Haviland
34 Wayne Ave, Dudley, MA                       home:  [508] 943 - 7974
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