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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?"

4 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. A very nice, recent article ... by hubie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Linux Journal has a nice article on fine-tuning your system (doing things like recompiling the kernel with the best compiler options and optimizations (it also covers hdparam).

    My only gripe with LJ articles is that, even if you put them in print mode, they still run off the end of my paper when I print them.

  2. UDMA, etc. by linuxator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The truth is, that even on "leading desktop OS" called with a name that reminds sheet of glass between frame, has not UDMA/66 and higher mode turned on by default.

    Problem is, that it breaks compatibility with older hardware... eg. you will put an old harddisk on your comp. and it will "blow up" becouse your fancy OS will think it can take faster transfer speeds... etc.

    --
    * Origin: XBase BBS (2:490/4100) Well the good old days may not return and rocks might melt and sea may burn.
  3. Re:wow.. I never knew that.. by Sentry21 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Amen to that. I had an old fujitsu hard drive, and I started playing with hdparm one day. Basically I turned on every possible option, including the ones marked in the man page as 'this will probably cause extreme filesystem corruption' and 'what are you, on crack? get the hell away from here!', and it worked great. Performance was simply excellent.

    Overzealous, I recommended these options to friends, who all locked up when they tried them (pinging out from IRC, etc), but I was undaunted. When my old HD started to give up the ghost, I got a new (well, new to me, this was 6 months ago) 2 gig WD for the box, and turned all the options on. Hours later, the entire filesystem was corrupted. After the whole system nosedived, I spent more than two hours hitting 'y' in fsck before I decided 'screw it' and reformatted. Fortunately, it was a clean install anyway.

    Moral of the story: test out your psychotic options before you put any important data on the drive. Other moral: say what you like about fujitsu, but their drives support more hdparm options than any other I've seen, and they don't break when you use them.

    --Dan

  4. Re:Careful with hdparm! by dimator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People, don't pretend you're cool and not make backups, thinking that nothing will happen if you go screwing with hdparm. I learned the hard way, and now I'll be digging up all my $HOME directory from cryptically named files in lost+found. It should be a fun night.

    I have only myself to blame.

    --
    python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"