After the discussion last week about tuning your install of 9.x, there were a few things in there that made my system a little snappier (turning off the hardware check for speedier boot, etc), but there are most likely a bunch of other things you can do. One such thing I found was:
The typical IDE HDD performance can be boosted by about 400% of its current value (no, I am not joking, and >today certainly is not April 1st). The command that does this is called hdparam. A lot can be written about >how we can fine tune your hard drive performance using hdparam, but here we give you just a peek.
Before you start give the command /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hda to get a feel for what your hard drive >performance is currently. Once you have done that, give the following command:
[root@necromancer /root]# /sbin/hdparm -c1 -d1 -m16 /dev/hda /dev/hda: setting 32-bit I/O support flag to 1 setting multcount to 16 setting using_dma to 1 (on) multcount = 16 (on) I/O support = 1 (32-bit) using_dma = 1 (on)
Now give the command /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hda, and be prepared to be pleasantly surprised by the jump in performance you see.
Now, I did this on my laptop, and DID see a 12% increase in buffer-cache reading speed, and a 25% increase in buffered disk reads. I also notice that whatever the hdparm is setting gets reset upon rebooting. 1) Is this dangerous for the file system? 2) If not, how do you make this permanent? 3) Anyone have any further performance-increasing tips? (I've already turned off cups, postfix, and several other "server" type services, but want to hear some of the gurus' hints & tips) Thanks! Steve