On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger <li...@xunil.at> wrote: > Joshua Murphy schrieb: > >> Non-ricer? Well... this sorta breaks that category. > > ;-) > >> There's a rather handy tool[1] already in the stage3, I've used it >> alongside bootchart to force-load everything needed into ram during >> boot, before it's needed, so execution gets held up by i/o just a >> little less. Actually shaved a few seconds off of my desktop's bootup >> once upon a time (3.0 GHz core 2 duo on 4GB of ram, which had >> excessive eyecandy while remaining fairly lightweight). The second use >> I put it through, and this one just a little more long-term useful, >> was preloading my wm, most of my home directory (primarily all the >> config files), aterm, firefox, a few other common tools I use, and the >> libraries they were using on my system while logging in. All of my >> applications were starting in no time at all. The catch... I took the >> brute force approach, rather than using an add-on tool to >> automagically choose what to prefetch for me. There are also setting >> in the bootscripts that, if you're not already using them, will make >> use of at least a little, using tmpfs here and there, and also just >> putting /tmp and /var/tmp onto tmpfs (outside of building things like >> open office, this tends to work well). Oh, and if you really do want >> to use up all that ram.... build openoffice in tmpfs... if it could >> use all 8GB for files only, it might actually work out, I know it >> kills off when you only have part of 4GB to feed it. >> >> [1] artifice ~ # busybox readahead >> BusyBox v1.14.2 (2009-10-13 06:37:22) multi-call binary >> >> Usage: readahead [FILE]... >> >> Preload FILE(s) in RAM cache so that subsequent reads for thosefiles >> do not block on disk I/O > > I use sys-apps/preload ... is this comparable? > > I don't need to speed up boot-times as I use suspend-to-ram on my main > workstation as well, so I don't care much about booting ... > > Thanks anyway for sharing! Stefan > >
Yep! sys-apps/preload goes a long way to automate what I did with busybox's readahead tool, and I'm about 99% certain they both make the same system call to do the work anyways... it's all a matter of how & where they get their list of *what* to fetch... I, as I said, took the brute force approach and made my list by hand. ;-) -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
