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Preload Drastically Boosts Linux Performance

Posted by kdawson on from the getting-in-line-early dept.

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."

2 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Difference with readahead? by pieleric · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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?