I’ve seen some web sites claiming big speed increases by limiting swap, turning off many services, and some other “tweaks”.
What are your thoughts on these “tweaks” ??
how much time are you wasting sitting and waiting on your computer??
i ask, because maybe you will get more speed out of another stick of
ram (or a faster hard drive, etc etc) than you will ever get out of
‘tweaking’…
anyway, my experience with ‘tweaking’ is that it often results in
making the system worse, OR unusable…and how much time would you
waste then just trying to figure out how to get it working again?
or: just compare it to Vista and see that it is already FAST!!
–
goldie
Tweaking helps with older systems, with the newer ones you won’t get much of a speed difference.
When I install openSUSE-11.1, I always (as part of the install) disable ipv6 and select beagle for no installation. I use 4 (and only 4) software repositories: OSS, non-OSS, Update, and Packman. I replace the crippled Novell/SuSE-GmbH packages with one’s packaged by Packman. I disable using the openSUSE installation CD/DVD as a respository, and instead I rely on the OSS repository.
In the case of nVidia graphics, I installed the nVida propriteary driver on 2 of my 3 PCs that have nVidia cards. I did this on one PC (with a 8400 GS graphic card) to get VDPAU support for HD video playback, and I did this on another PC (with a GX260 graphic card) because the openGL driver was very poor for that card.
And thats pretty much it. That is the only real tuning that I do.
If I wanted any more improvements, then given the small gain, IMHO its not worth the effort. Instead I would use a light weight distribution to get more speed (ie NOT use openSUSE, nor use Fedora, nor Ubuntu, nor Mandriva). My current lightweight favourite is “Elive” as I like its eyecandy and its wide availabity of applications (with it being a debian derivative). But my lightweight favourite changes often.
I personally disagree with this statement. I ran openSUSE 11.1 (with KDE4) on a pentium II with 384MB of RAM just to see if it would run. Even after tweaking various services and config files, the speed gains were marginal at best.
The biggest speed boost I got was from doing all of the standard stuff like disabling beagle, IPv6, and nepomuk. After that, anything else I disabled resulted in little to no change in system performance.
From my personal experience, tweaking a system does more bad than it does good as it often results in a broken operating system. Best thing someone can do is to follow the recommended performance adjustments and leave everything else alone. If possible, upgrade your hardware. If that isn’t possible, run with a lighter DE (like Xfce or IceWM) or CLI only. Cutting down on the number of installed apps to the bare essentials is also good, but indiscriminantly removing stuff is bad. And changing config parameters of things like the kernel or various daemons is asking for trouble.
You can not call disabling IPv6, Nepomuk or Beagle tweaking. As tweaking i’d call disabling unnecessary services, compiling my own kernel but not disabling those applications. I guess openSUSE (and any other linux distro) do not need much tweaking, just disabling unnecessary services and applications.
I don’t see why not.
I see your point, but IMHO its all relative to one’s experience.
What a beginner might call tuning, an expert would call something else.
When answering a post, one tries to read the “level” of the poster in phrasing the reply.
Aside from a few chosen changes or tweaks, whatever you want to call it, such as disabling beagle, there really isn’t much fat in openSUSE. Bearing in mind that fat is relative to the environment that you have chosen to start with. If you choose KDE or GNOME, well it will be heavier than Xfce or Openbox for sure, and you will not be able to cut it down beyond a certain point.
If you have enough RAM (1GB and above) just enjoy your machine and save your time.
If you have marginal RAM (512MB and below) choose your environment to suit. Or try to get a cheap RAM upgrade.
Some of the suggestions such as disabling postfix don’t save you very much, the footprint of postfix listening on localhost is only a few MB, and you lose system messages to root (or the designated recipient).