HOWTO: Makes apps load faster

[poofyhairguy]

This is a trick I found on the forum to make apps load faster- prelinking. I'm so happy Hoary is here. For those wanting a speed increase, here are two lines that make your apps load faster:

sudo apt-get install prelink

sudo prelink -amvR

The second one might take a while, but its worth it when its done!

Go Ubuntu!

[Trickyphillips]

This is a trick I found on the forum to make apps load faster- prelinking. I'm so happy Hoary is here. For those wanting a speed increase, here are two lines that make your apps load faster:



The second one might take a while, but its worth it when its done!

Go Ubuntu!
Thanks! Does "prelink -amvR" have to be used every time you install a new application?

[bored2k]

I find this prelink tip more elaborate:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1971&highlight=prelink (thank Jdong for that) .

[poofyhairguy]

I find this prelink tip more elaborate:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1971&highlight=prelink (thank Jdong for that) .


Good Call. it needs to be in the guide!

[kuleali]

Nice!

[PedroCC]

Ubuntu developers dont recomend Prelinking... [-X

[jdong]

Ubuntu developers dont recomend Prelinking... [-X

Well, for fast-moving releases (i.e. development releases), Prelink isn't a good idea because you can end up with catch-22's:

Library foo changed, so applications depending on foo won't work until they're prelinked. However, the prelinker is prelinked against foo, and so is the shell that you need to spawn the prelinker.....


On released versions, like Hoary/Warty, it's relatively safe to prelink, and it makes Firefox/Openoffice so much faster to start. Plus, the -R flag causes library addresses to be randomized, which minimizes the effectiveness of automated buffer overflow attacks.

[jiyuu0]

added to ubuntuguide.org
http://ubuntuguide.org/#loadprogramsfaster

[mrbass]

I highly recommend NOT this doing also. It's been a disaster in a couple of debian distrubutions. In all my tests of loading apps it didn't seem to make a difference with the noticable exception of openoffice as they can take it's sweet time to load especially on older CPU's. What went haywire? Just a few things I can remember is firefox no longer worked, many multimedia plug-ins got borked, etc.

To prelink openoffice only (cuts loading time in half)
sudo apt-get install prelink
sudo /usr/sbin/oooprelink -f

[jdong]

I can't attest to stuff getting borked. The only time stuff would break with Prelink is if:

A) Bug in prelink (Unlikely -- I have the latest version in Backports, which just has some Debian-integration fixes)

B) Major underlying library changes (Frequent if you live on a development branch)


IMO, just the added security advantage is good enough of a reason to prelink.

[Sniffer]

Thks for the usefull info.

Sniff.

[ssam]

so if a library changes then prelinkede birarys can go unstable. is it possible to unprelink a system before a majour upgrade?

i am running hoary, and very tempted to prelink. when breezy comes along (it seems far away now, but we'll be there in no time) i imagine it will be a good idea to unprelink, upgrade and reprelink.

is this possible?

[poofyhairguy]

so if a library changes then prelinkede birarys can go unstable. is it possible to unprelink a system before a majour upgrade?

i am running hoary, and very tempted to prelink. when breezy comes along (it seems far away now, but we'll be there in no time) i imagine it will be a good idea to unprelink, upgrade and reprelink.

is this possible?

Yeah. Except just reprelink.

[maart]

Nice speed while opening programs but all programs starts in full screen, so that panels is under new opened window.
How to change that window opens/rezise between these two panels not all over the screen?

[poofyhairguy]

Nice speed while opening programs but all programs starts in full screen, so that panels is under new opened window.
How to change that window opens/rezise between these two panels not all over the screen?


when it does that, put this in the terminal:

killall gnome-panel

[AndersAA]

I've had some problems with prelinking on amd64 (read big problems), quite a while ago though, haven't bothered after that (too much work to fix if it really breaks, as it took a considerable amount of system libs with it :/ )

[jdong]

I've had some problems with prelinking on amd64 (read big problems), quite a while ago though, haven't bothered after that (too much work to fix if it really breaks, as it took a considerable amount of system libs with it :/ )

Oh wow, I'll make a warning of that. I've never tried prelinking on non-i386 archs.

[James Brown]

](*,) After doing that I'm having serious problems with Kde (Kubuntu). When I try to execute kcontrol it hangs the Xserver... Damn... :-x

[royg1234]

I've had some problems with prelinking on amd64 (read big problems), quite a while ago though, haven't bothered after that (too much work to fix if it really breaks, as it took a considerable amount of system libs with it :/ )

Does this problem exist w/ Athlon64 computers running the i386 install?

[AndersAA]

Does this problem exist w/ Athlon64 computers running the i386 install?

nope, there's no way those two can be connected really :)

[skoal]

Sounds great! I'll have to try it. I definitely found a speed increase with this little gem: "startxfce4 -- -nolisten tcp +bs"

* That little "bs" is no BS. That backing store setting really makes my windows snap crackle and pop.

from '/var/log/Xorg.0.log':
(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA 3D Acceleration Architecture Initialized
(II) NVIDIA(0): Using the NVIDIA 2D acceleration architecture
(++) NVIDIA(0): Backing store enabled

\\//_

[i3dmaster]

I've had a 128MB old box running RHEL3 which has prelink in there, it runs quite slow when prelinking since the prelink is put into the cron.daily job. its gonna run pretty much every day...

[RastaMahata]

Sounds great! I'll have to try it. I definitely found a speed increase with this little gem: "startxfce4 -- -nolisten tcp +bs"

* That little "bs" is no BS. That backing store setting really makes my windows snap crackle and pop.

from '/var/log/Xorg.0.log':
(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA 3D Acceleration Architecture Initialized
(II) NVIDIA(0): Using the NVIDIA 2D acceleration architecture
(++) NVIDIA(0): Backing store enabled

\\//_
I get backing store disabled... I dont use xfce or any +bs mod... what's "backing store"? :(

[AndersAA]

I get backing store disabled... I dont use xfce or any +bs mod... what's "backing store"? :(

it stores some data of what's in windows, so it doesn't have to be "reloaded", although the current X implementation isn't complete (can be artifacts and some windows might not redraw properly at all, but that's probably "odd" implementations) and this will use more memory.

[RastaMahata]

it stores some data of what's in windows, so it doesn't have to be "reloaded", although the current X implementation isn't complete (can be artifacts and some windows might not redraw properly at all, but that's probably "odd" implementations) and this will use more memory.
oh, then I better dont mess with my xorg.conf...

Thanks!

[LaSSarD]

Can I prelink games? If so, is it recommended to prelink Enemy Territory? How do I do it? :)

btw, thanks you for the how-to, I used it with OpenOffice and it opens much faster :)

[AndersAA]

Can I prelink games? If so, is it recommended to prelink Enemy Territory? How do I do it? :)

btw, thanks you for the how-to, I used it with OpenOffice and it opens much faster :)


well... yeah, but prelinking wont make the application go any faster, it'll just help starting it faster.

[LaSSarD]

well... yeah, but prelinking wont make the application go any faster, it'll just help starting it faster.
Yeah, that's my problem: starting it. Few days ago it was really quick to start, but now it delays a lot and I'm getting nervous with it :P

Thx for your answer, but how can I do the prelink with the game?

[engla]

Hello there.

I managed to (almost*) bork my entire system, and I'm pretty sure it was because of prelink. Suddenly, most executables just said "can't execute binary file" or similar.

Possible cause: I installed new things from source, not from packages and prelink never ran before I restarted my computer (it hung on something, and I force-restarted it). If I remember correctly I installed emacs w/ GTK2 and stuff for my wireless card.

*I didn't have to reinstall. I found an amusing way to recover my system; Synaptic worked in failsafe terminal mode, so first I reinstalled every package needed to login to my default gnome session. I selected basically every package named libg* and reinstalled that.

Then I continued to find all the executables that didn't want to run.
Amusing way to check all binaries: I created a non-privileged user and ran a script that in quick succession started and killed /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/bin/* etc.. then I grepped for "cannot execute" on the resulting error logs and reinstalled each file that was corrupted. auto-apt was very helpful to find out exactly where each binary came from.

I'm a learner, and I /assumed/ that the linux user model would protect me... in theory my unprivileged user couln't do any harm at all to my system, even if I used every binary on the system. In hindsight, it worked perfectly.