Comments on: Why bother?

By: ext3 with data=journal results « Motho ke motho ka botho

ext3 with data=journal results « Motho ke motho ka botho — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:33:00 +0000

[...] I’ll have to double-check the situations where data=journal would be useful. I don’t think I’d recommend it for desktop systems just because it doesn’t boot as quickly, and that, for me, is usually a vague indicator of system performance. [...]

By: grndrush

grndrush — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:21:32 +0000

IMX (going back, specifically, to mainframes in the 1970′s…), SysInit time and run-time performance are normally INVERSELY proportional.

This is a so-simple-it’s-silly example, but then I’ve been up for 48 hours. It takes time for Linux to activate the swap partition – and the system runs MUCH faster in real-time as a result.

I realize the days of the traditional mainframe are long gone – but they made a perfect platform for demonstrating exactly this. When the “box” cost $5 MILLION, and served 100-1000 users over mostly 9600 baud async telco circuits, anything that could improve response time – even by .1 secs/transaction – yielded a HUGE (effective) performance increase when 500 people are shoving 4-8 transactions/minute/user at the machine.

There was an entire generation of ‘experts’ (I was one) who spent a large portion of their 8 hour days finding ways to improve performance (esp on-line performance) of those beasts – and, in MANY cases, it often involved tweaking SysInit, INCREASING boot time in order to DECREASE response times. When the only times you booted the thing were after a hardware malfunction or power fluxes or outages, no one cared how long boot took – hopefully you weren’t doing it even once a week (in reality, of course, the hardware of that era rarely run for a week w/o SOME problem cropping up). We would GLADLY trade an entire MINUTE of boot time in order to improve response times while running.

My $0.006 cents or so worth (in 1977 dollars…).

By: Fair but honest? Xubuntu 8.10 « Motho ke motho ka botho

Fair but honest? Xubuntu 8.10 « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:44:05 +0000

[...] times (which I hold as an informal indicator of system bulk) are about where I expected them: 1 minute 7 seconds to the login manager, and another 0:45 before [...]

By: Guitar John

Guitar John — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:17:15 +0000

Interestingly, when I experimented with #!CRUNCHBANG Linux a while back, one of the very unscientific speed tests I performed was a side by side boot-up smackdown between my wife’s laptop running a default Ubuntu install and my laptop.

Ok, my method didn’t produce a boot chart or any hard numbers, but it was fun. The results were surprising.

Even though my laptop has a slightly faster processor and twice the RAM, my laptop running #!CRUNCHBANG Linux booted up only 10-12 seconds faster than my wife’s – three times!!

So there is definitely more to building a fast system than adding Openbox to Xubuntu.

By: johnraff

johnraff — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:52:26 +0000

There’s a lot to be said for something reliably measurable, as you say. Of course not every tweak that shortens boot-time is necessarily going to improve performance once up (unused drivers?). It would be nice to have some kind of standard test for general speed.

The slower your processor the more important this gets (mine’s 450MHz) and the more time you might be prepared to invest to wring a bit more speed out of old hardware. By following this blog, we can benefit to some extent from the time you’ve invested, and plug the results straight in to our own setups.