HOWTO: Speeding up Debian

[hellfire[bg]]

I don`t think there was a noticeable increase in speed. I did it becuase at that time i had decided to remove everything i didn`t need and i obviously didn`t need these packages. For example i dodn`t have a via video card so i don`t need xserver-xorg-video-via - X.Org X server . The same goes for all the xorg packages - just see their description and decide for for yourslef. I removed most of the xserver-xorg-video-* packages (i kept only xserver-xorg-video-intel,vesa,v4l and vga). Also i removed most of the xserver-xorg-input packages (i kept packages like evdev, kbd, mouse, synaptics and wacom). The point is you can safely remove such packages, even if there is no speed increase you don`t need them.

[onemyndseye]

it looks to me that the kernel is loading, or has pre-loaded, modules and then hardware detection is trying to do it all over again. Or am I mis-interpreting?

It looks like those modules are loaded by modutils because they are already listed in /etc/modules.... then later on discover tries to load all needed modules... etc


2 ways to approach this depending on your taste.

Either keep discover: edit /etc/modules and remove all the modules that its complaining about since they will be loaded by discover.

Or ditch it in favor of a faster bootup. though you may have to edit /etc/modules from time to time if your hardware changes.


-Justin
One Mynds Eye

[Bulkley]

2 ways to approach this depending on your taste.

Either keep discover: edit /etc/modules and remove all the modules that its complaining about since they will be loaded by discover.

Or ditch it in favor of a faster bootup. though you may have to edit /etc/modules from time to time if your hardware changes.

I was able to remove all but one of the items in /etc/modules.

Can Debian boot without Discover1?

[chrismortimore]

Can Debian boot without Discover1?

Mine does.

[Bulkley]

Can Debian boot without Discover1?

Mine does.

So does mine, now. Thanks. I find this interesting. Does the 2.6 kernels do the hardware detection? Discover1 seems to have become redundant.

[chrismortimore]

So does mine, now. Thanks. I find this interesting. Does the 2.6 kernels do the hardware detection? Discover1 seems to have become redundant.

I believe udev does the hotplugging duties now, but don't quote me on that.

[onemyndseye]

".....I believe udev does the hotplugging duties now, but don't quote me on that...."


That is correct sir Although the kernels have came along way to help this process

discover1 (or discover2) is really just needed to discover non-hotplug stuff at boot-time and load the needed modules.... discover is really just simple program that parses the data in /proc/ and compares it to a XML database found in /lib/discover/

If your hardware doesnt change alot or you are comfortable editing /etc/modules then its not needed.

In other words: If the module for your hardware is already in /etc/modules.... its already been detected no reason to discover1

BTW chris:
Our conversation the other day on parameter passing finially intrigued me into whipping up a test version.. Alot of rewritting but I think I'll have a working version soon.

Take Care,
-Justin
One Mynds Eye

[chrismortimore]

That is correct sir Although the kernels have came along way to help this process

Huzzah Chalk one up for Chris

Our conversation the other day on parameter passing finially intrigued me into whipping up a test version.. Alot of rewritting but I think I'll have a working version soon.

Yeah, it's a real pest tweaking stuff to "clean up" code. Just now I'm writing a 3D engine (that I'm hoping to turn into a racing game eventually), and I'm tweaking it all to work with classes. Probably going to start again and import code as I need it, might be easier

[nopposan]

Thanks for the tips, everyone. I tried out a few, and so far so good.

Cheers.

[rippin]

<snip>
ENTERING THE X SYSTEM

$ nano .xinitrc

and i added the following lines:

unclutter &
<snip>

Brah!, I'm right there with you, and I hate that pesky mouse in my way. Didn't know of 'unclutter'. Kudos for mentioning it!

[Lou]

Hehe!

He who reads, finds out! - chinese storekeeper by my house

[rippin]

Hehe!

He who reads, finds out! - chinese storekeeper by my house

I did find a small problem using 'unclutter'; console games. I loaded Q3A and kept getting turned around, literally, in the game while mousing and keyboarding. Turned off unclutter and the game play was normal. So I wrote a little script to handle it. It goes like this (any corrections accepted if I goofed anywhere):

#!/bin/bash
killall unclutter &&
/usr/local/games/ioquake3/ioquake3.i386
unclutter&

I found I needed to leave off the '&' at the end of line three as the console hung awaiting the next command. Maybe ioquake3.i386 closes and releases without need of the '&' or '&&'.

[Bulkley]

This has been a most informative thread. I was wondering, if anyone can add tips on speeding up Debian response over the Internet. Are there firewall settings that can be adjusted? (I use Firestarter) Any tuning that might help video cards respond faster? (generic adjustments; not specific to make or model) Tuning network cards? Anything else?

[rippin]

This has been a most informative thread. I was wondering, if anyone can add tips on speeding up Debian response over the Internet. Are there firewall settings that can be adjusted? (I use Firestarter) Any tuning that might help video cards respond faster? (generic adjustments; not specific to make or model) Tuning network cards? Anything else?

Speed up ? I dunno, but this should help on the matter in general:
http://www.aboutdebian.com/network.htm
http://tinyurl.com/6rk4a

Try turning off the firewall and see if there's improvements - the kernel does nearly all firewalling by default any way - except for, I think, indent and port 113 which are "closed".

[jombeewoof]

What does these things do:
openbsd-inetd
rc.local ?

How do I install and use localpurge? Apt-get clean is also a great thing to do.

in laymans terms

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.

rc.local is basically a startup script. The only thing I have in rc.local is esd for my sound.

[chrismortimore]

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.

[Bulkley]

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?

[chrismortimore]

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.

[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]

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