Gentoo Netbook: Tweaking Performance, Part 2

Below is some more information on speeding up performance for a Gentoo netbook system. This is all just for testing and fun, and has worked well for me... the usual disclaimers apply.

My last entry on this topic covered performance improvements for portage, this one pertains to increasing the speed of the system in it's entirety.

First and foremost, minimal applications are best suited to netbooks, so when choosing software go for the most stripped down options.

DesktopEnvironment - Fluxbox
Browser - Midori (though firefox works pretty well))
Terminal - Terminator
Editor - vim
NetworkManager - wpa_supplicant/dhcpcd

Beyond that, the following packages seem to help a great deal.

Preload and Prelink

Preload is a daemon which addresses the disk vs memory speed difference when it comes to loading programs. By preloading commonly used files and programs into memory, the latency experienced when opening or interacting with programs is drastically decreased.

Prelink on the other hand is a sort of high level linker and reminds me of the way a binary joiner works, it staticly binds necessary libraries to their executables so that there is no delay due to load references during execution.

The combination of these two pieces of software make opening standard applications such as a web-browser virtually instantaneous.

The two are installed and setup as follows...

Preload:

root@oblivion# emerge preload

root@oblivion# rc-update add preload default
Preload can be further configured via /etc/preload.conf, but it is not normally nessecery.

More information on preload ->  gentoo-wiki: HOWTO prefetch files on boot

Prelink:

root@oblivion# emerge prelink

root@oblivion# prelink -amR

By default Gentoo configures prelink to the normal paths of executables, it also puts in place a daily cronjob to refresh all prelinked programs in the event of system changes.

More information on prelink -> gentoo.org: prelink howto

tmpfs /tmp:

much like using shm for portage, you can mount your /tmp directory as a tmpfs file system that will exist in ram instead of on disk. This will give a small performance increase to any programs that use the /tmp directory.

In /etc/fstab add the following line:

tmpfs             /tmp         tmpfs         defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Firefox can get a small performance increase by changing it's cache directory to the tmpfs filesystem you created in /tmp, at the loss of retaining that cache between reboots. I find this to be nice middle ground between the normal persistant cache and having no cache at all.

To do this, simply add a new key to about:config in firefox with type string as follows:
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory    /tmp

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more to come as I research this further..