Your Opinion on the Pre stuff for a speedy OS

Support & Help Requests
#1

I’m getting ready to take my box back to square one and wanted to get people(s) opinion on whether or not these still work / worked / never worked / or just a pipe dream to make things faster

Preload
PreLinking
make /tmp to tmpfs
zswap

Preload/prelink at one time helped back in the day not sure if it is still relevant
the /tmpfs helps my ssd drive (i think) at least that is what I have read.
and zswap I can’t really tell because by OS is a mess right now from all my poking around.

Anything else I should try?
Thanks

Some questions about /tmp to tmpfs
#3

This is one of the first things I do after installing a system. The other is to set noatime in fstab for pretty much all other partitions except swap.

Zswap I find no use for, since most of my machines have enough RAM to avoid swapping in the first place.

One thing to add: if you have “enough” RAM and use Firefox, moving profile (not cache!) to tmpfs speeds up things noticeably. I rolled my own, but from my Arch days I remember there are ready made scripts for this. The trick, of course, is to automate the tmpfs mount and umount + set up a cron to back up profile to disk periodically.

Edited to add:
Discussion on the topics “/tmp to tmpfs” and “Firefox profile to tmpfs” continues here:
Some questions about /tmp to tmpfs

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#4

Yeah not a big fan of FireFox I run opera, chromium and otter browser usually as an appimage. I am just experimenting on this box to help improve other (family members and friends) boxes some have a lot of memory and others have little that is why I was dinking around these settings lately.
as for the preload and prelink like I said at onetime that helped me out when I was a bit slower on the whole. zram still unsure but I think I will give it a go on my uncles CPU to see if it helps him any. 4 or 8 megs of ram he has.

The /tmpfs is a must do for me also ssd and all.
I was just asking to see if there was anything else out there that would help my family out to improve there Linux experience. Plus its fun to learn a new way to skin a the proverbial cat.

Thanks all

#5

Having a couple of low-end machines here myself I know what you’re saying. It starts from picking the “right” distro (even low end machines should have decent DE, IMHO), shutting down unneeded services at boot, finetuning the settings…

My biggest challenge has been Nokia Booklet 3G with Atom Z530, 1 GB RAM (mem=896mb set in kernel parameters), horrible Intel Poulsbo graphic chip (it’s not made by Intel, only licensed), Toshiba 120G 4200 RPM hard disk. RAM is soldered, so cannot just go and shop for more RAM. HDD could be changed to mSATA SSD but apart from that, not much that can be done.

I did test zram on it and found no benefit from running it. Haven’t tried zswap yet on that machine, it could be worth a try. Then at least I could report back my findings. Will try to find some time later today. :slight_smile:

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#6

Well, I did try zswap on the Booklet. It’s hard to tell if it helped things at all or not, the machine has too little RAM. I think the best option would be to replace the 4200 rpm HDD with a SDD so swapping would be speedier to begin with. Then test zswap again.

#7

I’m not sure if it works or not for one of my cpuz either. I ran some test but they didn’t report anything different. (From Memory) I didn’t record my first 2 runs in a safe place.
so if you have any different luck please let me know, Thanks samuvuo