HOWTO: Make Linux Faster and Smoother!

[sayakb]

Except for the tty disabling (which is more inclined towards better security), decreasing swappiness, using preload, disabling unneeded services are directly related to increase in performance.
1. Preload: Caches applications priorly. Minimum requirements are 1GB RAM.
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Drastical...m_with_Preload
2. Disabling unneeded services dont need any clarification IMO
3. Decreasing Swappiness: This has been tested and found to be effective. Due to that reason, new kernels would support dynamic control of swappiness. For lesser RAM usage, swappiness would decrease to much lower values than the current fixed value: http://kerneltrap.org/node/1044
4. OO performance: http://www.blog.solarwind.metafy.org...fice-in-linux/

[Jose Catre-Vandis]

i don't have a vm.swappiness entry in my sysctl (on Hardy). Should I still add one?

[sayakb]

Yes.. Add the line.

[Jose Catre-Vandis]

OK thanks

[PGLGreg]

Except for the tty disabling (which is more inclined towards better security), decreasing swappiness, using preload, disabling unneeded services are directly related to increase in performance.
1. Preload: Caches applications priorly. Minimum requirements are 1GB RAM.
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Drastical...m_with_Preload
2. Disabling unneeded services dont need any clarification IMO
3. Decreasing Swappiness: This has been tested and found to be effective. Due to that reason, new kernels would support dynamic control of swappiness. For lesser RAM usage, swappiness would decrease to much lower values than the current fixed value: http://kerneltrap.org/node/1044
4. OO performance: http://www.blog.solarwind.metafy.org...fice-in-linux/

Thanks for the references. I don't have any questions about 1. or 4., but I have some doubt about 2. and 3. For 2., I just don't see any reason to think that disabling an unused service will have a good effect on performance. For 3., I would like some evidence that your value for swappiness is better than the default or other values one might assign.

[sayakb]

2. The bluetooth service and the cupsys service keeps running in background. If I dont use it, I find no reason to keep it running.

3. Have you tried to fill up your RAM? Let swappiness be at its default value, open FF and keep pressing Ctrl+T and keep a watch on the system monitor side by side. Check when and how much the swap fills up at the default swappiness level. Now decrease swappiness and check again. Ofcourse, the swap would start filling up much later. I tested this on my laptop.. With the default swappiness, with about 45-50 tabs open, my RAM usage goes upto 700MB and swap goes 250MB.
With swappiness at 10, the swap usage is 100MB when RAM is 900MB full. More the swap is used, slower the system gets. I dont know if you would regard this as, but what I have seen that even with the RAM empty, the swap fills up unnecessary, and makes the system slow. And that is the reason why the new kernel has a dynamic swappiness value..

[PGLGreg]

Thanks for taking the time to tell us what sort of evidence supports your recommendations.

[sayakb]

np.. The Note portion at the bottom of the HOWTO is clear enough I guess
You may not wish to alter swappiness, rather wait for the new kernel to release and do it for you!
Plus, its not my recommendations. Its a collection of facts that you can easily find arbitrarily distributed on the web..

[nycste]

heya, im just looking through my processes running and all that jazz and have no idea unless i google each and every one of them about what they are and what they do..


are there any guides or scripts to remove most of these programs that are never needed as long as they can be installed at a later date

case in point i removed bluetooth thing from startup following ur guide, i thought it worked but clearly bluetooth-applet thing was still running so i said lets remove you. looked it up was told to go to synaptic and remove everything connected to bluez, i didnt remove the libblue something file because it said it was needed for 5-10 other things and i used my brain quickly and said dont remove that lol..

bluetooth-applet was still running after removing all bluetooth applications and programs minus the libblue file in question.. then i read people who removed that lost ability to use nautilus and another major program... so im glad i didnt..

summary. guide to removing all this useless stuff for people who might never need it.. bluetooth is a simple example, and printing servies if you dont have a printer.. now if you do ever add a printer id imagine it would be as easy as going to add/remove or synaptic and installing drivers again and printer should work or donwloading them from the companies website or something

thanks for any response to this

[Martin von Wittich]

Ubuntu comes with 6 ttys enabled. You usually don't need more than 1 tty at a time. To disable tty2 to tty6:

sudo bash
cd /etc/event.d
mv tty2 tty2~
mv tty3 tty3~
mv tty4 tty4~
mv tty5 tty5~
mv tty6 tty6~

Now, at a terminal, do:

sudo gedit /etc/securetty

And carefully comment out tty2 to tty6 by adding a # in front of them. Save it and close the file. Disabling unneeded ttys also helps to enhance security: http://www.bigwebmaster.com/General/...OWTO/x810.html.

Sorry for these harsh words, but that is blatant nonsense. While disabling ttys is not that dangerous as long as there is at least one still active, it's nonetheless of no use. For each activated tty, Upstart will spawn one getty process. According to pmap, one such getty processs requires just about 270KB memory. So what's the point? Disabling 5 ttys will effectively save just ~1MB memory and therefor the computer won't get any faster (nor more secure, see below).

Now, at a terminal, do:

sudo gedit /etc/securetty

And carefully comment out tty2 to tty6 by adding a # in front of them. Save it and close the file. Disabling unneeded ttys also helps to enhance security: http://www.bigwebmaster.com/General/...OWTO/x810.html.

When reading this I feel impelled to assume that you have actually no idea what you're talking about; even the website you're using as reference doesn't support your statement at all.
The securetty file is read by login(1) to determine on which ttys root is allowed to login; it has absolutely nothing to do with enabling/disabling ttys. Probably the only time when you need to edit this file is when you're using a serial console - if that is not listed in this file, you'd need to add it so you can login as root over the serial console.

Martin