Ubuntu's performance : how to speed up ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> Hi Vincent
> 
> Performance is subjective IMHO.

Not at all, it 100% objective. When I click on icon to start a program
for the first time , how many seconds does it take to load ?
Time is very easy to measure ! :o)
Mostyl, when I start X-Plane, it takes a minute or two, up to 10 minutes
depending how detailled I want the scenere/textures to be.
And loading it the second time is hardly any faster than loading it the
first time.
Same for Open Office.
Even the Terminal takes ages to load, around 2 seconds, despite being
such a small program. Gedit too takes almost 3 seconds to load, despite
being a simple text editor which ought to load instantly, like the
terminal.
Gnumeric takes several minutes to load moderately large Excel files. It
is easy to measure any improvement in speed, just time it with your
wrist watch !

> 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.

Sorry, not sure I understand. Do you mean that SCSI would be faster
(overall, access time, transfer rate), than IDE ?
I do have a SCSI controller card already, so I could get used/cheap SCSI
disk off of Ebay, if that wold help Ubuntu.


Vince