Ubuntu's performance : how to speed up ?

[Jon Dixon]

Hi Vincent

Performance is subjective IMHO.

Modern hardware is one thing, but that also comes at the price of
less-tested drivers and such so it's not always 'the best thing'.

I run Ubunty Hoary solely on my laptop, and the performance is good
enough for what I need. It's hard disk consistantly gets 20MB/Sec on
that test you describe.

My desktop has a gig of RAM, hyperthreading CPU, a serial ATA hard
disk, DVD rewriter and such yet Ubuntu never even used to install on
it as it wouldn't find the CD even after booting from it. I have the
new Hoary Array 4 but haven't had time to play yet.

If you want true speed from a hard disk that's IDE and not SCSI go
with a Western Digital Raptor drive - they're 10,000 RPM :)

For SCSI, the choice is a lot bigger.

Just my thoughts ...

Jon

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:17:05 +0100, Vincent Trouilliez
<vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr> wrote:
> 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
> 
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