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HOWTO: Speeding up Debian

Share your HowTo, Documentation, Tips and Tricks. Not for support questions!.
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chrismortimore
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#91 Post by chrismortimore »

jombeewoof wrote:inetd is basically a superserver. some net services(read ftp, ssh, et al) can be set to rely on this to run. not necessarily necessary on any system.
inetd is hardly used these days, as most of these services are now started by their own init.d scripts anyway (because you get greater control over them when you don't use inetd). The only thing I have that uses inetd is vmware.
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#92 Post by Bulkley »

chrismortimore wrote:inetd is hardly used these days, as most of these services are now started by their own init.d scripts anyway . . .
Good info. I disabled the one line left in inetd.conf (netbios-ns dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/nmbd nmbd) and everything still runs. Can I safely remove inetd?

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chrismortimore
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#93 Post by chrismortimore »

Bulkley wrote:Can I safely remove inetd?
I think some things require it to be installed. But you don't have to run it. The only package I have installed that needs it is "netbase" though.
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#94 Post by Bulkley »

I discovered that inetd has been replaced by xinetd.

Swappiness is a new term for me. It refers to the choice the computer makes between using memory or harddrive swap partition. The swappiness is usually set to 60, but we can change it. Some experts set it to 100; others to 0. If you have a lot of memory, you can speed your machine behavior by lowering its swappiness. I set mine to 10 but everyone has to make his own decission on this. Check this article http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8308 for instructions.

Swappiness is one of those issues that needs some benchmarking tools. Any suggestions?

madsurgeon
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omitted stuff

#95 Post by madsurgeon »

Hi all

I've found this thread by chance when searching for the relevant info. It was a good read. Many tips have been discussed. Yet a few have been forgotten. Therefore I have registered myself and here are some more:

- first of all, before messing around in your system, make some investigations what really eats up processor cycles and/or memory. Useful candidates are top, xrestop, dpigs and du -S.

- concerning the discussion about display managers:
I agree that wdm is the best one on small systems, but why use a dm at all? If you don't like logging in on a text console, try Qingy. I love it.

- nobody mentioned hdparm. When it comes to speeding up disk access there's no way around hdparm.

- if you're on a particularly small system (like me on my old laptop with a 300MHz processor and 32MBy of RAM), you might get even a shorter bootup when changing getty for fgetty, a very small and fast getty clone.

- in terms of window managers, my personal favorite on small systems is evilwm. It's very lightweight and fast. No bells and whistles, but a set of very good keyboard shortcuts. And it's easily customizable.

- network speed: you might get some speed improvement by issuing
# echo "0" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack
# echo "0" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps

- it happens that you are connected to a router which does not understand ipv6. You can see that if your browser always waits before transmitting data. In that case disable ipv6 entirely.

- have a look at the powertweak package

- concerning the bootup process there are interesting reads here and here.

- if you're looking for speeding up iceweasel (former firefox) you might be interested in this.

- for speeding up the desktop experience there were two articles in Linux Journal two years ago. Some stuff is certainly still useful.

And then we could join forces and update the wiki article to the same topic at http://wiki.debian.org/?LinuxSpeedup .

Cheers

Lou
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#96 Post by Lou »

Thx for the articles, madsurgeon, it sure is interesting!
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Lou
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#97 Post by Lou »

I launched sysvconfig and disabled:

atd
cron

I did this 2 weeks ago, and so far it hasn't changed anything on my system.
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#98 Post by Bulkley »

Lou, you don't need cron?

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#99 Post by Lou »

I don't think so, what for? Maybe i do...and don't know it?
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AgenT
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#100 Post by AgenT »

Just off the top of my head, you need cron to:
- rotate logs
- update the find database
- update man database
- take care of lost+found
- take care of exim (default MTA - required for error messages, etc.)

I am sure there are plenty of others. Disabling cron is just asking for trouble in the long run. Cron jobs are an essential part of Linux systems. Essential programs assume that it is up and running. Do NOT turn crond off.

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#101 Post by Lou »

I never knew that, thx!
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diego1116
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#102 Post by diego1116 »

If you don't want "cron" running all the time, I think you can switch to "anacron" (I never tried it though):

http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/anacron
Package: anacron (2.3-13)
cron-like program that doesn't go by time

Anacron (like `anac(h)ronistic') is a periodic command scheduler. It executes commands at intervals specified in days. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously. It can therefore be used to control the execution of daily, weekly and monthly jobs (or anything with a period of n days), on systems that don't run 24 hours a day. When installed and configured properly, Anacron will make sure that the commands are run at the specified intervals as closely as machine-uptime permits.

This package is pre-configured to execute the daily jobs of the Debian system. You should install this program if your system isn't powered on 24 hours a day to make sure the maintenance jobs of other Debian packages are executed each day.
http://anacron.sourceforge.net/
What is Anacron not?

Anacron is not an attempt to make cron redundant. It cannot be used to schedule commands at intervals smaller than days. It also does not guarantee that the commands will be executed at any specific day or hour.

It isn't a full-time daemon. It has to be executed from boot scripts, from cron-jobs, or explicitly.

synss
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#103 Post by synss »

Hello all, I think these were not mentioned here (but sure were at other places):

link /bin/sh to /bin/dash

dash is a lightweight POSIX shell, /bin/sh is called via the shebang (#!/bin/sh) by most shell scripts, calling a lighter shell will make it start faster, makes a difference on boot up. Ubuntu has that by default.

I like putting /tmp and /var/run on tmpfs, tmpfs is like using part of your ram as a file system

Code: Select all

/etc/fstab
...
tmpfs   /tmp   tmpfs   defaults 0 0
tmpfs   /var/run   tmpfs   defaults 0 0
you can achieve the same with mount --bind to /dev/shm and it is actually very nice to have a rc script to mount tmpfs on /dev/shm as should be, create directories in it and mount bind /tmp and /var/run (and $HOME/my-tmp) in there.

EDIT: note that I also have /var/lock and /var/log on there, /var/log is not recommended, because the logs will be lost if something goes wrong and the computer shuts down. But I am using a laptop, so I do not care much about the logs anyway.

Also, putting all that on tmpfs requires a bit of tweaking in the init.d stuff or /etc/syslog.conf to get rid of error messages, things like
[ ! -d /var/run/screen ] && exit 0
and the like.
END OF EDIT


now about cron anacron and atd

Another thing is cron, anacron and atd are NOT the same thing!
1. you want cron, period
2. anacron is not a daemon, and removing it is not a good idea: either your system is always up, in which case it is never executed (so nothing changes whether it is there or not) or you shutdown your laptop/workstation, in which case, cron will fail to, say, update you man page index or locate at 3am and you need anacron to do it
3. at it extremely useful on shared workstation, I mean, computers you send jobs to for number crunching, it is not useful for any other case, AFAIK. at is such that it executes a job you have sent it when it can, meaning, when some other job has finished executing and frees enough CPUs for the next job.
=> It is awesome when you need it, if you do not know what it is you do not need it.
Last edited by synss on 2007-06-25 09:31, edited 1 time in total.

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chrismortimore
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#104 Post by chrismortimore »

synss wrote:now about cron anacron and atd

Another thing is cron, anacron and atd are NOT the same thing!
Skip back to page 4, it's been said already: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=69922#69922
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Lou
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#105 Post by Lou »

While googling for something else i ran into this. Some tips are in this thread, some are not, good read anyhow.

Optimizing Desktop Performance Part 1
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8308

Part 2
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8317

Part 3
http://www.unix-tutorials.com/go.php?id=331
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#106 Post by craigevil »

System tweaking :: sidux.com :: debian based live cd development
http://sidux.com/index.php?module=pnWikka&tag=tweaking

The part about deborphan is the only part I wouldn't suggest using if you run Sid.

Using OpenDNS and the internet tweak part along with all the IW tweaks I use has made my internet just fly.

"preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times."
http://sourceforge.net/projects/preload

Preload used along with prelink, means even apps like OpenOffice and Firefox load in around 2-3 seconds.

My total boot time on a cold boot is under 30 seconds to the KDE desktop.
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Bro.Tiag
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#107 Post by Bro.Tiag »

craigevil wrote:My total boot time on a cold boot is under 30 seconds to the KDE desktop.
That is impressive, IMO, since my best boot time is 22 Seconds on a netinstall, no login, Sid running e17 w/ a few odds & ends.

Cheers

andrek
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#108 Post by andrek »

Hi,

Well after applying those patches, my debian sid doesn't boot faster. However, I saw recently that 'ReiserFS: checking transaction log' takes loong time ( about 30sec. ). What's wrong?
Anyway, I tried to remove gdm from my system.. it also wants to uninstall gnome-desktop-environment which means it will also delete many many gnome programs.. which kinda sucks ;)
Here's my fstab file

Code: Select all

/dev/hda8       /               reiserfs defaults        0       1
/dev/hda6       /boot           reiserfs notail          0       2
/dev/hda9       /home           reiserfs defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid        0       2
/dev/hda7       none            swap    sw              0       0
I'm also thinking about reinstalling debian using something like minimal-install. What file systems would you recommend to get high speed?

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#109 Post by synss »

it also wants to uninstall gnome-desktop-environment
My understanding of Debian package management and its gnome related thing is that you can remove gnome-desktop-environment and you can keep the packages you want by saying they were installed manually, in aptitude, go to the >installed packages >gnome branch and use m (for manually installed --- will not be removed as a dependency of gnome-desktop-env) or M for automatically installed (and therefore automatically removed) packaged. You will see an A in the third field for auto-removable packages.

By the way, most (if not all) of the libs and libdevel should be auto-removable (and let them go if you change the flag and it says they are to be removed) as they probably were all installed as dependencies of other things.

Doing this will bring you to the same point as reinstalling from scratch and adding the packages you explicitly want, just done the other way round. Hence, you keep a working system.

andrek
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#110 Post by andrek »

What file system would you recommend to get as much boot speed as possible? I'm going to install debian from a netinst cd.

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