The Need for Speed!

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Tuesday 19 April 2005 00:40, Andrew Kar wrote:
> The real killer though was the readahead file. I dont know how the Fedora team 
> messed this up but I dont use any auto updates scheme at all yet this file 
> was FULL of the wrong version numbers of files and libraries making it 
> practically redundant.
> Since I dont use Gnome and didnt want its libs and apps filling up space that 
> linux could better utilise for KDE and my instant app-start gratification I 
> populated the readahead rather crudely with dir listings off apps that 
> started with 'k' the whole contents of /usr/lib/kde and any k* and libk* 
> stuff from /usr/lib as well as any commom apps and libs that I use.
>         The result of all the above after rebooting?
> A desktop at least 30-40% faster although subjectively it feels at least twice 
> as fast and is certainly far more responsive than XP.

> For those worried about the concept of preloading, linux has always utilised 
> almost ALL available memory rather than let it sit there going to waste. This 
> merely forces linux to allocate it more how you want it in a more user 
> efficient way rather than linux keeping it as a disk cache or whatever.

Do you realize that there are machines with 'only' 128Mb of RAM?

Do you seriously propose users _manually_ tweak readahead?
It's error-prone as your own post shows.

Linux can do better.

> 	These are the techniques windows has always used in order to achieve its 
> responsiveness except windows goes even further to another method we should 
> look at which is to watch how an app loads itself and its libraries and then 
> restructure its on disk form for maximum load speed.
>
> Anyhow I hope this info is of use to some of you. If your distro does not have 
> readahead I see no reason why it cant be added. Prelinking is another matter 
> though as AFAIK both the linker tools and the kernel need to support it. It 
> is actually part of a package called kernel utilities If I recall correctly. 
> Note also that KDEINIT should be disabled and not used if using prelinking. 
> Both Suse and Fedora take care of this with environment variables.

I'd rather go uclibc way. That is, by stopping bloat instead of accomodating it.
--
vda

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