I'd like to think I have a decent system. (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667, 7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500) I show it to people sometimes when they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work because it came preinfected with Vista. For the most part, my system ROCKS! But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things. It takes about two minutes to do a full restart. I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check. Still, I'd like to make it faster. I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for a long time. On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware wasn't half what I have now. I am less skilled with Linux than I am with Windows, but I'd like to change that.
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
So far, I've trimmed down what services start at boot, I even have VMWare set not to start automatically, which should shave off a few seconds (No VMs are configured to start on their own, only the service was.) I wish the stuff that starts up on boot could start up asynchronously, or as asynchronously as possible. I'm not holding my breath on that though. Also, my display flickers every now and then. It doesn't appear to affect the applications or the system. It happens with and without beryl and vmware running. I'm using nvidia's latest driver as well. Any ideas?
What distro are you using? How old is it? Some things off the top of my head:
Make sure your using a journaling file system. Ext2 Can be quite slow when booting up when it does consistency checks.
Check your init scripts and disable things you don't use often.
Make sure that your kernel is built with the Preemtible (Low Latency Desktop) Model turned on.
Fedora Core 6 I've had the laptop for 2 weeks I'm using ext3, but as I understand, journaling is optional, and I don't know how to check to see if its on. I can tell you that watching it boot, I don't see any consistency checks going on. By init scripts, I assume chkconfig is one way to check/configure those? I haven't yet developed my leet Linux ninja abilities to the point where I'm comfortable trolling around the init directories. I have, however pruned things with chkconfig and gnome's graphical service editor. I'm looking up that preemptible thing right now...
Thanks for your help! -Billy
On 3/9/07, Jeremy Fowler [email protected] wrote:
What distro are you using? How old is it? Some things off the top of my head:
Make sure your using a journaling file system. Ext2 Can be quite slow when booting up when it does consistency checks.
Check your init scripts and disable things you don't use often.
Make sure that your kernel is built with the Preemtible (Low Latency Desktop) Model turned on.
On 3/10/07, Billy Crook [email protected] wrote:
Fedora Core 6 I've had the laptop for 2 weeks I'm using ext3, but as I understand, journaling is optional, and I don't know how to check to see if its on. I can tell you that watching it boot, I don't see any consistency checks going on. By init scripts, I assume chkconfig is one way to check/configure those? I haven't yet developed my leet Linux ninja abilities to the point where I'm comfortable trolling around the init directories. I have, however pruned things with chkconfig and gnome's graphical service editor. I'm looking up that preemptible thing right now...
Thanks for your help! -Billy
There's no need to go through those directories if you don't want to. Use the Service configuration tool:
run `system-config-services` or look for the shortcut, usually named "Services" in your menu.
You can turn on/off services and start/stop services. Usually, each service has a brief description of what it does.
More to your question, I believe there's some work being done toward speedier booting in Fedora, my memory is short on the details however.
Peace
On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 16:21 -0600, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
Make sure that your kernel is built with the Preemtible (Low Latency Desktop) Model turned on.
Since no one else corrected this statement I feel that I should. Preemptible kernel configurations are specficially made available as a weak stepping stone to a time when the Linux kernel offers real-time scheduling. The pre-emptible feature will only increase the rate at which the kernel responds to hardware interrupts and even then only by a few milliseconds at most. This would mostly be visible in things like mouse cursor responsiveness when the system is under heavy IO load. It will not help the start up time of any application.
I agree that a preemptable kernel probably won't help start up times. It will help his overall system latency, which he was complaining about also.
However, I have to correct you on your statement. Preemptable kernel configurations are hardly a week step when you consider a twenty fold increase in process-level responses in some cases.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5600
"The theory is that when I/O data becomes available, a preemptive kernel can wake an I/O-bound process more quickly. The result is higher throughput, a nice bonus. The net result is a smoother desktop, less audio dropout under load, better application response and improved fairness to high-priority tasks."
However, Billy, I just realized you have a Core2Duo. Most package distros compile for lowest common denominator. Which means your probably not using the full potential of your processor. Which has dual cores and a 64-bit architecture. Here is a good wiki to point you in the right direction on setting up your kernel:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Intel_Core2_Duo
It's a Gentoo wiki, but should be valid for all distros.
-----Original Message----- From: Jason D. Clinton [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 11:23 AM To: Jeremy Fowler Cc: Billy Crook; [email protected] Subject: RE: Speeding up a machine
Since no one else corrected this statement I feel that I should. Preemptible kernel configurations are specficially made available as a weak stepping stone to a time when the Linux kernel offers real-time scheduling. The pre-emptible feature will only increase the rate at which the kernel responds to hardware interrupts and even then only by a few milliseconds at most. This would mostly be visible in things like mouse cursor responsiveness when the system is under heavy IO load. It will not help the start up time of any application.
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 09:34 -0500, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
However, I have to correct you on your statement. Preemptable kernel configurations are hardly a week step when you consider a twenty fold increase in process-level responses in some cases.
I don't dispute that the preemptable kernel is valuable -- especially for cases where you are doing audio or video capture -- but surely we can agree that the different between a 2ms wake-up latency and a 0.1ms wake-up latency is not going to be noticed by the end user in the vast majority of user-space applications?
Billy Crook wrote:
I'd like to think I have a decent system. (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667, 7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500) I show it to people sometimes when they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work because it came preinfected with Vista. For the most part, my system ROCKS! But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things. It takes about two minutes to do a full restart. I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check. Still, I'd like to make it faster. I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for a long time. On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware wasn't half what I have now. I am less skilled with Linux than I am with Windows, but I'd like to change that.
There are modified boot sequence scripts for many distros that will speed up the boot process if that is your goal. The default scripts on most systems are inefficient, but they are also very robust in dealing with frequent and complex changes to the boot sequence. If you switch to one of the "fast boot" script sequences, then you may break everything if you add/change some essential service in the future. If people complain about the boot time on a default linux install, point out that they don't have to reboot as often as with Windows.
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Depending on what you are doing, changing these types of settings may not even produce a noticeable affect. Boot-time slowdowns are generally a result of waiting on timeouts, not disk I/O.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
There are some tricks you can pull to speed things up, though they aren't really all that worth-while unless you are really out to impress someone. On windows, IE and Office load so quickly because most of the software components are already in memory when the OS starts. You can get Linux to preload Firefox with http://www.techiecorner.com/48/speed-up-firefox-start-up-time-with-firefox-p... and you can preload openoffice by passing it a command line option (-quickstart doesn't work in 2.1, but -nodefault -nologo achieves roughly the same thing). If you launch these when the window manager session starts, then when users click the icon they will get to a usable window almost instantaneously.
~Bradley
On Friday 09 March 2007 10:00:10 pm Billy Crook wrote:
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata,
sdparm....?
and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device".
IDE to SCSI emulation has been broken for a while. Throughput should be the same with the regular IDE driver properly setup.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
I recall from when I moved to Linux, that my biggest complaint was that opening cmd.exe on Windows was instantaneous (literally), and Konsole takes a good second or two to appear, even with prelinking and such. I'd like to know why Linux is so slow, as well.
Jeremy suggested a journalling filesystem over ext2-- however, during actual system running, ext2 would most likely be faster. Journalling really only helps with unexpected power loss and even then mainly just slows down booting. The difference between ext2 and ext3 *is* the journal. Without a journal, ext3 becomes ext2.
Gentoo's init system does support starting services in parellel.
I recall from when I moved to Linux, that my biggest complaint was that opening cmd.exe on Windows was instantaneous (literally), and Konsole takes a good second or two to appear, even with prelinking and such. I'd like to know why Linux is so slow, as well.
Konsole is so much different from cmd.exe that that just isn't a fair comparison. Maybe xterm would be fair - and that's a big maybe
On Saturday 10 March 2007 06:41:02 am Arthur Pemberton wrote:
I recall from when I moved to Linux, that my biggest complaint was that opening cmd.exe on Windows was instantaneous (literally), and Konsole takes a good second or two to appear, even with prelinking and such. I'd like to know why Linux is so slow, as well.
Konsole is so much different from cmd.exe that that just isn't a fair comparison. Maybe xterm would be fair - and that's a big maybe
It serves the same purpose.
On 3/10/07, Luke-Jr [email protected] wrote:
Konsole is so much different from cmd.exe that that just isn't a fair comparison. Maybe xterm would be fair - and that's a big maybe
It serves the same purpose.
In the sense that my Chevy and an armored personnel carrier both serve the purpose of transporting people. There is so much stuff I can do at a Bourne or Korn prompt (much less bash) that in Windows would require a VB script or a compiled binary to do the same thing.
On Sat, 2007-03-10 at 03:27 +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
I recall from when I moved to Linux, that my biggest complaint was that opening cmd.exe on Windows was instantaneous (literally), and Konsole takes a good second or two to appear, even with prelinking and such. I'd like to know why Linux is so slow, as well.
Konsole, specifically, is slow to start because it's starting up and registering bindings with the DCOP server on the local screen.
Note that OpenOffice is equally slow on both Windows and Linux. The OO.o project is spending the vast majority of their time, currently, trying to fix that problem.
On 3/9/07, Billy Crook [email protected] wrote:
I'd like to think I have a decent system. (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667, 7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500) I show it to people sometimes when they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work because it came preinfected with Vista. For the most part, my system ROCKS! But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things. It takes about two minutes to do a full restart. I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check. Still, I'd like to make it faster. I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for a long time. On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware wasn't half what I have now. I am less skilled with Linux than I am with Windows, but I'd like to change that.
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
So far, I've trimmed down what services start at boot, I even have VMWare set not to start automatically, which should shave off a few seconds (No VMs are configured to start on their own, only the service was.) I wish the stuff that starts up on boot could start up asynchronously, or as asynchronously as possible. I'm not holding my breath on that though. Also, my display flickers every now and then. It doesn't appear to affect the applications or the system. It happens with and without beryl and vmware running. I'm using nvidia's latest driver as well. Any ideas?
Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
To help speed up boot times you might want to check the Upstart project that Ubuntu has been working on. I know that it's supposed to speed up boot times by replacing the old way init works. I'm not sure if it's made it's way onto Fedora yet though (or if it will).
On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 21:27 -0600, Kyle Sexton wrote:
To help speed up boot times you might want to check the Upstart project that Ubuntu has been working on. I know that it's supposed to speed up boot times by replacing the old way init works. I'm not sure if it's made it's way onto Fedora yet though (or if it will).
Note that this advice should only be taken as where to find information on what people are working on with regard to boot times. While it would be possible to inject a new init system in to Fedora, the amount of time and level of skill required would be so high that it's only viable as a research project.
Billy Crook wrote:
I'd like to think I have a decent system. (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667, 7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500) I show it to people sometimes when they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work because it came preinfected with Vista. For the most part, my system ROCKS! But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things. It takes about two minutes to do a full restart. I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check. Still, I'd like to make it faster. I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for a long time. On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware wasn't half what I have now. I am less skilled with Linux than I am with Windows, but I'd like to change that.
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
So far, I've trimmed down what services start at boot, I even have VMWare set not to start automatically, which should shave off a few seconds (No VMs are configured to start on their own, only the service was.) I wish the stuff that starts up on boot could start up asynchronously, or as asynchronously as possible. I'm not holding my breath on that though. Also, my display flickers every now and then. It doesn't appear to affect the applications or the system. It happens with and without beryl and vmware running. I'm using nvidia's latest driver as well. Any ideas?
Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
In gentoo there is an option to have the rc scripts run in parallel, this speeds up the boot sequence 100%, I'm not sure if Fedora has this option but you can look. Anyway, in gentoo if you put RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes" in to /etc/conf/rc it should do the trick.
-SO
It could actually be that you have so much hardware it's slowing things down! I have an AMD Athalon 2500 at 1800MHz, 512M RAM, and a 7200RPM ATA drive. Firefox loads in 2-3 seconds, ooffice in ~8. Not sure of my boot time, not going to reboot now just to check.
You might looking into doing some sort of suspend-to-disk if you want faster startups, but changing distros will probably give you the best speed-up for the least cost and effort. Fedora is not a high-performance platform, it's a robust, easy-for-users, works-with-almost-anything approach that includes several different types of kitchen sink.
Mandriva was originally forked off of RedHat to provide a speed-optimized version of the distro, and that's what I'm running here. Being RH derived, you'll find it very familiar. Gnome is available, although KDE is the default. Many third-party programs are available, version upgrades work pretty well, and applications are frequently back-ported to existing releases. Any GUI based package manager is going to be a system hog, but the console based urpmi package management system is excellent (you MUST get good mirrors though).
Ubuntu is the obvious choice. "Everybody's" using it, and they are working on an optimized parallel boot system.
One choice that might help - try installing lilo instead of grub. I think it's faster, but I like it better anyway.
As always, your mileage will probably vary.
On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 11:09 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
You might looking into doing some sort of suspend-to-disk if you want faster startups, but changing distros will probably give you the best speed-up for the least cost and effort.
The two packages you would need installed to do this would be uswusp and gnome-power-manager. Additionally, you need to pass the name of the swap partition to the resume= parameter on the kernel boot line.
Gnome Power Manager calls out to uswusp to actually dumpt the contents of RAM to disk. Subsequently, the contents are reloaded from the swap partition on reboot.
Note that a great deal of effort is still going in to this frame work to make it as seamless as possible so do not expect it to actually work with your particular hardware as of yet.
Kgpg wasn't installed; I added it and asked it to update the keys from the server. Now I get this:
Message was signed by [email protected] (Key ID: 0xB52AA3938DB3BF09). The signature is valid, but the key's validity is unknown.
...and it still doesn't open the encapsulated messages by default.
On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 16:00 -0600, Billy Crook wrote:
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
This will happen if the BIOS currently has the device in PIO mode. See if you can put the device in UDMA mode from within the BIOS drive view. You definietly do not want to use SCSI emulation these days.
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Arthur Pemberton -
Billy Crook -
Bradley Hook -
Jason D. Clinton -
Jeremy Fowler -
Jonathan Hutchins -
Kyle Sexton -
Luke-Jr -
Monty J. Harder -
Scott Oertel