Preload rocks! Speed up your application launching with this.

[Caleb Marcus]

So I did some more digging, and it looks like prefetch is some sort of
replacement for readahead (for speeding up the boot process), and it
looks like they're planning to integrate it into Hardy. I certainly hope
it's an improvement on readahead.
On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 22:27 -0400, Aaron Haviland wrote:

> 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 :)
> 
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