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Linux Tuning Tricks?

Posted by michael on from the extra-10-horsepower dept.

Milo_Mindbender writes: "Over the weekend I was attempting to improve my CD ripping performance and discovered RedHat 7.2 was running my Ultra/ATA 100 hard drive in a very slow non-DMA mode. After a fair amount of searching for how to fix this, a trivial change (look here) improved drive performance from 3MBs to 38MBs! FSCK on my 40gb partition went from over 5 minutes to under 1! This issue wasn't documented in RedHat's manuals but it effected a number of boxes in our office so I'm betting many other people in the world have the same problem. This made me wonder how many other common Linux tuning snafus there might be that a lot of people are probably missing. Do you know of any?"

5 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. disable system services on startup by babychess · · Score: 3, Informative

    On RedHat, you can use ksysv, the init editor, to turn off boot-time system services that are not needed. Candidates are daemons for GPM, USB, SCSI, LPD, APM, which are all enabled by default, and which may not be needed.

    1. Re:disable system services on startup by eufaula · · Score: 3, Informative
      with redhat (maybe others) you can also run the command "setup" and have a curses-based way to do it. or, you can go into /etc/rc3.d (or whatever runlevel your distro/os normally runs at) and move the S##xxxx scripts to K##xxxx to prevent them from starting. this is the standard way of starting/stopping services on SYSV UNIX, so this holds true for Solaris and others.

      -- aside -- you CAN move them to anything other than S##xxxx, but i normally stick with the standard and use K##xxxx

  2. Careful with hdparm! by dead_penguin · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you are going to be playing with hdparm, take my advice and make a backup first! Some interfaces aren't fully supported by the kernel yet, and trying to run drives off of them in certain modes could break in a bad way. In my experience, this then means massive filesystem corruption and a complete reinstall.

    Of course I'm not saying *don't* play with hdparm; just be sensible and only try it on a system you have backed up and can afford to lose for a little while as you're rebuilding it.

    --

    It's only software!
  3. Re:PCI Bus speed by Gothmolly · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your PCI bus speed IS 33MHz, unless you are overclocking or running a new, rare, high-end box.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  4. Powertweak and /proc twiddling by embobo · · Score: 4, Informative

    You may try to use Powertweak to alter settings to improve performance.

    Then there is tweaking settings via /proc. I used to have a link to some excellent documentation on it but, alas, I can't seem to find it. You could try reading the various bits of info in the Documentation tree of the Linux source but it is pretty spartan.