Performance shock (oops follow-up)

[paul cooke]

On Sunday 24 April 2005 08:11, david wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 13:30 +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> > On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:38:02 +1000
> >
> > Peter Garrett <peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> > > As for Firefox, while it's true it starts more slowly on first launch,
> > > I haven't noticed any lack of speed subsequently. It might also be
> > > worth remembering that the way RAM use shows in Linux is different - a
> > > lot of memory use is actually cache etc...
> >
> > Sorry, just re-read CB's original post, in which he refers to *cpu* and
> > not *ram* - my mistake. I haven't noticed Firefox hogging cpu though -
> > even with 20-30 tabs open...
> >
> > Apologies for the reply to my own post.
> >
> > Peter
>
> Surely the biggest thing you're missing is that once Windows has been on
> a drive for a few weeks and you've installed a few things that speed
> starts to slow down dramatically.
> Linux has a consistent speed/behaviour whereas Windows just gets more
> and more fat and bloated and slow as the registry fills up with crap and
> the browser cache begins to slow surfing down.
>
> For OpenOffice go to Tools > Options and Memory and set the amount of
> Memory allocated to OO to a higher value - I set mine to 128MB in total
> with 6MB per object and OO flies along.
>

prelinking your executables also gives a dramatic speedup in their loading as 
the OS no longer has to work out how to load in the application and all it's 
dependant libraries as the donkey work has already been done.

this is what I do now after every update:

sudo prelink -amvR

It takes a long time for the first run and if the update has been a deep one 
affecting many other programs, but most of the time, it only takes a couple 
of minutes.

it is also possible to do the same for OOo, there is a separate command 
('oooprelink' of all things) to run as normal prelinking doesn't work for it.

> nux