Preload Drastically Boosts Linux Performance

Nemilar writes "Preload is a Linux daemon that stores commonly-used libraries and binaries in memory to speed up access times, similar to the Windows Vista SuperFetch function. This article examines Preload and gives some insight into how much performance is gained for its total resource cost, and discusses basic installation and configuration to get you started."

Comments

Re:What, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

SuperFetch was one of the first things that I had to disable in Vista. I had downloaded a linux distro (a large .iso file) using Firefox, and for the next two weeks, everytime I rebooted my computer I would have to listen to my hard drive chug away for the next 10 minutes while it loaded the file into memory. (The new resource monitor in Visa is nice -- that is what helped me track down the problem).

My computer is MUCH faster now that SuperFetch is disabled. Like night and day.

Difference with readahead?

[pieleric]

Currently I use readhead which, at boot time, basically uses a special linux syscall to tell the kernel to read some files ahead whenever it has nothing else better to read.

Does anyone knows the difference between the two projects? Does preload have a better algorithm for selecting the files to read? Does it also use this special syscall?

Re:LiveCDs do this...

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Unless you're still coming from the Windows mindset where you're used to closing an application after every use of it, preload isn't of much use at all. If you never close an application, startup time is not an issue. The firefox window I'm posting this response from now has an uptime longer than any windows box with automatic updates turned on and is only clocking in at 118M/22M resident/shared. I could possibly see it being of some use if you actually open and close OO.o regularly (it's a slow, bloated beast even by Microsoft standards) but that's an argument against OO.o not an argument in favor of preload.

This is linux, people. We like tiny apps that require almost zero load time that you can chain together with pipes. Catering to bloated, poorly coded, Microsoftesque apps shouldn't be an issue for us.