Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnsie
Another way I've heard that might speed things up a little is:
(in terminal)
sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf
and add the line:
vm.swappiness=10
If these methods work you should see some improvement after reboot.
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In my personal experiences the default vm.swappiness=60 is okay for most users who don't like tweaking.
You'll get a bigger speed improvement by using icewm / fluxbox instead of default xubuntu(which uses xfwm4 as a window manager) if you want to sacrifice (some) ease of use for a lighter memory foot print. You don't need to reinstall. Just install either fluxbox or icewm on top of xubuntu and choose it from the "sessions" option in your login screen (gdm).
icewm and fluxbox are both lighter than xubuntu. They both use little memory and diskspace. It's a matter of taste which one you like more. If you want to go for the Ubuntu gnome look I recommend icewm with the icebuntu theme (
http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/icebuntu )
You can icewm install it by :
$sudo apt-get install icewm
To get more useful stuff for icewm :
$sudo apt-get install iceconf iceme menu icewm-themes icepref
For fluxbox :
$sudo apt-get install fluxbox
To get more useful stuff for fluxbox :
$sudo apt-get install menu fluxconf
log out of gnome and choose a fluxbox/icewm session from gdm.
Also try opera (from the new dapper commercial repository) instead of firefox. You should go to the preferences dialog of opera in order to make sure it doesn't use too much memory for caching(tools->preferences->advanced->history->memory cache->off). I think opera uses less memory than firefox after having it running for a while.
If you decide to go for even more tweaking. Now is the time for some swappiness tweaking :
In my case I have 1 gb of memory and a large part isn't used (or only used for cache) I choose to prevent swapping as much as possible by vm.swappiness=0. For 512 mb of memory this is also the best setting if you use xubuntu and be careful (about not using too much memory).
This was the best setting for laptop with only 64 mb of memory running icewm / fluxbox : vm.swappiness=100. Because with that amount of memory swapping is needed anyway so better to do it as soon as possible.
In cases between 128 mb and 512 mb of memory you need to try and tweak and find out what works best for you. You can use "$free -m" to see whether swap is used.
-If you (almost) succeed in not using swap at all then set vm.swappiness to 0
-if your computer still needs to swap much set vm.swappiness to 100
-if you don't notice any difference go for vm.swappiness=60
You can find more information about "free -m" and swappiness here :
http://gentoo-wiki.com/FAQ_Linux_Memory_Management