Ubuntu's performance : how to speed up ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

I was wondering how I could speed up Ubuntu.

A friend who has a dual CPU motherboard told me all the benefits of
using two CPUs with Linux. Basically, Linux being such a huge
collection/stack/pile of daemons, services, processes etc, especially
Gnome, executing two of them at the same time really speed things up !
So, I am sold, my next board will be a dual CPU one.


Now, seeing as hard disk performance seems to greatly affect Gnome's
performance, and seeing that my 40GB drive is a few years old already, I
am wondering how much faster modern drives are. Drives being cheap, that
could be a simple way to speed up Ubuntu a bit, until I can afford an
expensive motherboard.

I tested my drive transfer rate with hdparm : "sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda"
I ran it 3 times, and it's about between 15 and 20MB per second.

Could someone with a super modern (IDE or SCSI) hard drive, run this
command so I can get a feel for how much better modern drives are, ie,
is it worth buying one ? Thanks. :-)

Last thing, seeing as RAM is cheap, and modern boards can carry huge
amounts of RAM, and seeing as my  /usr folder weigth "only" 2.0GB of
data, would it be possible to put say 4GB of RAM on the board, use 2GB
as norma system RAM, and the other 2GB of RAM to pre-load the
entire /usr forlder at boot ?
Is there a mechanism in Linux (Kernel ? or higher-level stuff ?) that
would allow preloading some data into RAM at boot ?

I have "only" 512B of RAM right now, but it could be enough to
experiment anyway. Since Ubuntu runs fine with 256MB of RAM, I could sue
the other 256MB to load a small part of /usr, say OpenOffice.org for
example, as it's so slow to load from the disk.

Vince