Since the machines we give to the students aren't the fastest in the world, I've been on the lookout for ways to increase performance with what we've got. A couple things I've found that maybe we could put into the master clone image:
1. Prelinking The manpage summarizes: "prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for their relocation at startup significantly decreases and also due to fewer relocations the run-time memory consumption decreases too (especially number of unshareable pages). Such prelinking information is only used if all its dependant libraries have not changed since prelinking, otherwise programs are relocated normally." FWIU, prelinking works best with programs written in C++. I think Firefox is written in C++, but I'm not sure. And the program should be run after installing new software---so maybe after we do the big updates. My own experience: prelink is available via apt-get. I ran it as root: prelink -avfmR. It took about 30 minutes to process. I only noticed a slight increase in how fast Firefox loads but OpenOffice and the Gimp seemingly load much, much more quickly. Downside: I am running Gnome and do not have KDE installed but I do have the kdegames package installed. I might have to reinstall that package because they seem to be broken, but everything else appears okay and much faster. 2. Firefox Optimizations I've made these Firefox optimizations and they work really well for me. I've noticed a huge increase in page loading, that is. In the Firefox URL bar, type about:config. Scroll down to the following lines and change the settings to the number listed: network.http.max-connections 128 network.http.max-connections-per-server 48 network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy 24 network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 12 FWIU, settings higher than these would cause an undesirable increased load on site servers, but page loading is much snappier. just some thoughts, sean
