HOWTO: Make Linux Faster and Smoother!

[sayakb]

Reduce Swappiness
If your computer has 1GB+ RAM, you would be hardly needing your swap space in most cases. It is evident that the RAM is much faster than your hard drive (A good 677MHz DDR2 can give 3000+ MiB/s while a standard hard drive can give around 50MiB/s). So it's better to let the RAM handle most of the processes. The tendency to use swap is called swappiness.Swap space is a cached area on the HDD that the OS utilizes as a memory overflow/dump area. To reduce swappiness, at a terminal, type in:

sudo sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10

If you wish to reduce the swappiness permanently, do:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

And change the vm.swappiness value to 10. If the line doesnot exist, add the line vm.swappiness=x


Using preload
Preload caches the most accessed applications on your disk and memory. Preload should not be installed on systems having memory less than 1GB, otherwise, it would not have any effect, or rather would advesly affect the performance. To install preload, at a terminal:

sudo apt-get install preload

Once installed, preload will automatically start during boot. It normally takes 20-30 launches of a program to start being cached by preload.


Disable unneeded startup services
Some services start-up automatically even if you don't need them. Goto System->Administration->Services and press Unlock to provide your password for the keyring. You may disable services like Bluetooth, Logging and Printing services if you don't need them.




Use lighter alternatives
You can use lighter alternatives to the existing programs you may use:

• Firefox: Firefox has slightly higher memory consumption. You may use Opera or Epiphany as an alternative.
• OpenOffice: You may use AbiWord and Gnumeric Spreadsheet as an alternative to OO-Word Processor and OO-Spreadsheet
• Nautilus: You may use Thunar or PCManFM as an alternative.
• Gnome-Panel: You can use FBPanel as an alternative.
• Gnome-Terminal: You may use XTerm as a lighter alternative.

If you want to reduce RAM usage drastically, use a lite WM like Openbox and configure it to use Gnome apps. In that way, you can use all Gnome apps but you would use up very less memory.
Openbox configuration guide: http://urukrama.wordpress.com/openbox-guide/


Disable unneeded ttys
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.

Make OpenOffice faster in Ubuntu
Launch OO-Word Processor. Goto Tools->Options and click on Memory. From top to bottom on the window:

• Reduce the Number of steps to 20
• Set Use for OpenOffice.org to 128MB
• Set Memory per object to 20MB
• Set Number of Objects to 20
• Check Enable systray Quickstarter

And press OK button.
Note: Enable the quickstarter only if you use OpenOffice extensively. Otherwise, the quick starter would be unneeded.


After performing these changes, do a reboot for the settings to take effect.

NOTE: This HOWTO is based on useful information collected from various online resources. This is neither a speculation, nor has been benchmarked and published. Users can try these tweaks, and keep the new settings if they find it beneficial, or switch back to their old settings otherwise, as these are completely safe and reversible changes to your system. I personally see productive output of these tweaks on my computers

[sarah.fauzia]

What is the effect of disabling the other ttys? It's nice to disable what I don't need but if it has any risks involved.. just would like to know!

[sayakb]

What is the effect of disabling the other ttys? It's nice to disable what I don't need but if it has any risks involved.. just would like to know!

No, there are no risks involved. Also, we rarely actually need the ttys until something goes wrong and we need the terminal immediately. You may keep two ttys active and disable the rest.

[nycste]

heya just found this thread trying to fix the ttys

is my error, what do i do

sudo bash
cd /etc/event.d
/etc/event.d# ls
control-alt-delete rc1 rc4 rc-default sulogin tty3~ tty6
logd rc2 rc5 rcS tty1 tty4~
rc0 rc3 rc6 rcS-sulogin tty2~ tty5
mv tty2 tty2~
mv: cannot stat `tty2': No such file or directory


thanks

so i want to
1. check to see if i already disabled them? and
2. if they are still running findout how to properly disable them

[sayakb]

You have disabled (renamed) tty2, tty3 and tty4 as the output reflecs. Do:

mv tty5 tty5~
mv tty6 tty6~

Here is how it should look:

glade@Mean-Machine:/etc/event.d$ ls
control-alt-delete  rc1  rc4  rc-default   sulogin  tty3~  tty6~
logd                rc2  rc5  rcS          tty1     tty4~
rc0                 rc3  rc6  rcS-sulogin  tty2~    tty5~
glade@Mean-Machine:/etc/event.d$

[nycste]

You have disabled (renamed) tty2, tty3 and tty4 as the output reflecs. Do:

mv tty5 tty5~
mv tty6 tty6~

Here is how it should look:

glade@Mean-Machine:/etc/event.d$ ls
control-alt-delete  rc1  rc4  rc-default   sulogin  tty3~  tty6~
logd                rc2  rc5  rcS          tty1     tty4~
rc0                 rc3  rc6  rcS-sulogin  tty2~    tty5~
glade@Mean-Machine:/etc/event.d$

ok well i did what you told me, i currently have no idea what i fully even did lol, but my ls command shows your setup so thanks

how do i see that i disabled them, sorry for asking such a simple question prob

[sayakb]

Renaming them and commenting them in the /etc/securetty file would disable them. Sorry, I just missed out the /etc/securetty file in the post. I'll add it now

[nycste]

Renaming them and commenting them in the /etc/securetty file would disable them. Sorry, I just missed out the /etc/securetty file in the post. I'll add it now

just to make sure

# /etc/securetty: list of terminals on which root is allowed to login.
# See securetty(5) and login(1).
console

# for people with serial port consoles
ttyS0

# for devfs
tts/0

# Standard consoles
tty1
#tty2
#tty3
#tty4
#tty5
#tty6
tty7
tty8
tty9

ETC.......

looks solid?

[sayakb]

Sorry for the late reply.. I was offline..
And yes, looks OK to me

[PGLGreg]

What reasons are there to think that the changes you recommend improve the operation of a Linux system? What tests have you performed, and how did they come out?