How to make Ubuntu extremely fast

[Ryan Toler]

Steve Lamb wrote:
> NoOp wrote:
>   
>> Anyone else seen this:
>> http://tuxtraining.com/2008/09/28/how-to-make-ubuntu-extremely-fast/

>> Comments?
>>     
>
>     Some of the advice there is downright dangerous to be giving without
> explanation.  I'll just give one example, the flags he says to add to fstab:
>
> noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback
>
>     noatime = This should be, at least, relatime.  Why?  Check the man page...
>
> relatime
> Update inode access times relative to modify or change time.  Access time is
> only updated if the previous access time was earlier than the current modify
> or change time. (Similar to noatime, but doesn't break mutt or other
> applications that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it
> was modified.)
>
>     So unless one knows /all/ of their applications do not require atime then
> it is dangerous to set this since it will cause unintended behavior.  Same for
> nodiratime.
>
>     Writeback is also dangerous.  From the man page:
>
> writeback
> Data ordering is not preserved - data may be written into the main file system
>  after its metadata has been committed to the journal.  This is rumoured to be
> the highest-throughput option.  It guarantees internal file system integrity,
> however it can allow old data to appear in files after a crash and journal
> recovery.
>
>     I don't know about anyone else but data integrity is the whole point of
> why I use a journaled file system.  If I wanted the chance of data corruption
> why enable ext3 when ext2 is perfectly fine?
>
>     Are these suggestions bad?  No.  The problem is that it doesn't explain
> the consequences of those suggestions.  A neophyte Linux user who hits that
> page thinking "Oh, there's no harm in this" isn't going to recognize they
> symptoms of those changes when things go wrong.  I know them but I've got over
> a decade of using Linux under my belt.  In fact, I don't (and wouldn't)
> implement most of those suggestions and for good reason.  He should at least
> explain the cons to offset the pros of speed.
>
>   
I would advise getting a faster hard drive or use raid. You will see the 
best improvement from a cold boot if you have faster disk and reduce the 
number of programs that autostart. I myself have delayed start on a few 
programs that i want to use often but don't need them the second the 
desktop is loaded, that way if i want to open a program i can but my 
normal ones open a minute later.

Also what is the bottleneck for  you system? RAM/CPU/Disk Access speeds? 
or is this purely software (Ubuntu) being slow (waiting for one service 
to start before a 2nd one can or mounting network drives)