Step two tweak one broke my installation. X-server couldn't start. I did a backup of fstab and menu.lst but could only revert them using a live cd because / partiton was apparently mounted as read-only. I wonder if it has something to do with # comments in menu.lst not being unchecked? Be careful people!

As you can see from the screenshots in the guide, I've applied these modifications to my system with success. You probably copied the fstab lines in the example into your fstab file!

The lines in the menu.lst file are supposed to be with an # in front of them! The ones that are commented out are with ##.

Same here, tweaking /etc/fstab broke by graphical environment too. This is the 2nd time it happened. Frankly, I didn't think modify partitions would do this. Oh well, live & learn.

it also happened to me. could someone please tell me how to fix my /etc/fstab
i try: vi /etc/fstab but it wont let me save,
please help

In response to the not being able to save thing... you have to be a super user to save a file like that. So instead of just vi filenamehere type, sudo vi filenamehere

try using 'sudo' before this command

Tweaked. Screwed my x server. Thanks for wasting a few hours of my life.

I also got the problem with broken x.
I think it is caused by the root filesystem being mounted as readonly.

I fixed it by vriting
sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 /
and editing the fstab file, i had to remove:
,data=writeback
Doing that and rebooting worked for me.

You guys are not reading the post. Do not copy the example, but apply the highlighted portions only. It will work perfectly if you do it correctly. If X won't start, you did it wrong.

I can confirm that the fstab trick busts certain installs. It worked on my little acer xubuntu 8.04 and busted the file system for my ubuntu 8.04 desktop. i could not and did not copy paste as I use a third machine to show this tutorial.

on the fstab portion i did not find a significant improvement and would suggest just skipping it.

OgreProgrammer, I am curious to know what type of hard drives do you have on those computers you mention. Are they both SATA or IDE? Or one is SATA and the other one is IDE?

About teak one..I have to mention that on my toshiba laptop booting process is longer every time. It's like it's creating grub profile everytime it's booting. Is that normal ?

hey hows it going. i by no means am no Linux expert i aint even close to being an amateur but the entry into fstab errors=remount-ro, will for sure lock people out of their OS.when the drive remounts on boot and any mistakes are found. the system switches over to READ ONLY. on the / drive. therefore not letting anything load up right. thats why the X window wont open up.. my 2 bits on this one..and i know im right! :0)

Wrong! The "errors=remount-ro" mount option is already on your system, therefore it's not the one that "breaks" the installation... I've applied the tweaks on 4 computers.. all with success!

well mister linus tovald.or whatever it is. its teh solution for my particular problem. which is happening apparently to some other peeps.. so go ahead take off that mount on error . and the problem will be gone

well dude, maybe there is some sence in mounting / read-only when errors are found. and maybe the better solution would be to fix the errors, instead of forcing your system to ignore them... jm2c

How about how to do a preload of some often used programs like firefox, gedit, amarok, or anything else you can think of?

Preload is not good for your system! Trust me!

Why is preloading bad? And why should we just trust you?

"preload is an adaptive readahead daemon that prefetches files mapped by applications from the disk to reduce application startup time." - from the original description of preload.

You already have a readahead daemon running on your Ubuntu machine (see the first tweak)! Also, preload was used long time ago...

Please be a little more descriptive of what these tweaks actually do, and what the available options are!
b/w how did you encrypt the disk? alternate disk?

Yes, here is the tutorial -> http://news.softpedia.com/news/Encrypted-Ubuntu-8-04-85271.shtml

The tweaks are supposed to make the boot process faster with about 10 to 15 seconds less then the default installation... and will improve the overall performance of the system.

Hi!
after applying the hard disk tweak when i try to extract an archive with archive manager it says "not enough memory". i have memory left according to system monitor.
what can i do?
thanx!

Hi,
This is a good article, but ..
One important part is missing .. (Must do to avoid crashing)
In Step-2,after tweak one
run the following command --->
sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/

This article is the first step to study linux recovery after unexpected power down. :)

Regarding the last step - the swappiness tweak. I think you need to go and read about how swappiness actually works.

First of all this step is completely unnecessary for a lot of users since most machines nowadays will have upwards of 1G of ram and will hardly, if ever, need a swapfile.

Swappiness only works it's magic when the system is idle, so won't be using up any system resources when you need them, and doesn't actually remove any of the information from ram, jsut means that that space can be used immediately if need rather than after a delay while the swap takes place.

Swappiness is generally considered to be a Good Thing and setting it to zero is only adviseable on very rare occassions.

There is a reason someone decided to code it in the first place, and why almost all distributions include it.

I am amazed that XFCE and other window managers have not been discussed when trying to improve performance on older pc's. I use XFCE(Xubuntu) because I like the un-cluttered environment and because I have an older PC (Athlon XP 1700 and 512mb RAM).

There are other similar options like Blackbox and Fluxbox but the advantage of XFCE is that it looks almost exactly the same as gnome. It is very much slimmed down so if you care that your icons perhaps are a little sharper or more detailed then don't bother. If on the other hand you would like to see plenty of old hardware in perfectly working condition then this is a great option and any of the above tweaks that work are still applicable. You could turn off all the background task it would just require you to navigate slightly different menus (better menus IMHO).

Also, if I could recommend not trying to un-install Gnome or KDE. It is very tricky to completely remove these desktop environments, rather boot a Xubuntu live CD, decide if you like the way it looks or not (bearing in mind that you can't really tell performance from a Live boot) and install from scratch.

One final note: You can still have Compiz! It takes a bit of Googling around to find a howto to get it working (to save you the time: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=203877) but Compiz still works

Could someone please post how to repair your system after step 2 broke it?

The problem is your are left with a system that is mouted Read Only, so you cannot change anything back.

here is my journey in the linux world:
ubuntu -> xubuntu -> debian xfce -> debian dwm (lightweight window manager, 30k of c code).

if you want lean and mean try debian.
it's almost identical to ubuntu but with less bloat.

xubuntu is also a great option, and you can try the alternate cd (it's the debian installer btw) which allows better customization.

the fstab tweak broke my system, changed my disk to read only.. my simple fix:

Boot from live Ubuntu 8.04 disk
PLACES menu, chose the appropriate drive, mounted
sudo gedit /media/disk//etc/fstab
changed back to relatime,errors=remount-ro

rebooted and all is well again!

X-server couldn't start but we can login using command line, type in username and password. Then type this command to fix problem:

sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1

it works for me
rgds

great tutorial!but i think the author missed an important point that removing the incomplete packages, isolated libries &residual Config package can also speed up ubuntu,please see this article for details:
http://www.linuxine.com/2008/06/speed-up-ubuntu-boot-speed.html

The hard disk tuning options are rather dangerous. Setting write back mode will lead to data loss in the event of a power failure. Only use these options if you have a UPS, never use these options on a laptop!

I've borked X by typoing the fstab line. Thats easy to do. But if you type it right, it works. Don't forget to do the tune2fs. I recommend booting with a liveCD/liveUSB and performing tune2fs only when the filesystem you're tuning is NOT mounted. Do not tune2fs on a mounted file system.

As for "don't do writeback on a laptop", thats just insane advice. Only do writeback if you have a UPS? True. But a laptop has a battery, no? Which is a UPS, no? A laptop is exactly the hardware that benefits the most from this tweak.

I tried this and now Ubuntu only boots to busybox lol.

But it booted to BusyBox *fast* didn't it?

nodiratime is implied by noatime, so you don't need both in there, just noatime will suffice.

I've got this problem to, and it's really annoying, but fortunately I installed Zenwalk 5.2 and see fstab configuration
"default,noatime"
and use this to my Hardy (just add noatime) and it works

but thanks for other trick, thats really useful

It is better to add:

CONCURRENCY=shell

to /etc/default/rcS as that file is later sourced by /etc/init.d/rc and is the more correct way to manage initscripts.

On Tweak two, do I add the the line to the very end of the file? This doesn't make sense based on what is shown.

Concurrency=shell used to work lovely before these last releases.
On 8.04 and Distro's based on 8.04 it breaks the network manager applet if yo change often. On Mint it 'breaks' the menu sometimes. I have installed almost 70 PC's & laptops with 8.04, so if your pc/ laptop does wierd things after the speedup, remove the concurrency=shell. Thanks 4 the tut!

I got the auto login to work! Thanks. BUT I rebooted after I wrote the first command line in /etc/fstab. Broke my Grub! How do I get back in to wrire the other lines? I can get an Ubuntu shell. Thanks,
Frank

Got it worked out. Thanks you guys, for all the help.
Frank

Thank u very much !

Please note that

concurrency=shell

will most likely inhibit mounting of encrypted partition via pam-crypt. No idea why that is, though.

I only used the swapiness tweak.
I have an ubuntu 8.10 install (note: 8.10 has not come out yet, i am using the Alpha 4 version, which is updated now to alpha 6)

Anyways, in my effort to understand swap better, i earlier changed my swap to as large as i could make it -- 15 GB on my laptop that has 512 ram. I had the hd space. Why not?

Anyways, i followed this tweak and turned swappiness to 100 and there is a HUGE change for how fast things load. I dont have a program to quantitatively show the difference in load times, but i can tell a huge difference.

Some good information, I was able to implement all the suggested tweaks to my system with no problem at all, From here I am looking forward to the next version 8.10 that is expected to come out on the 30th of this month.

I will admit I am a noob so far as Ubuntu goes but have been more then pleased and with these tweaks the system runs better and faster when followed and paid attention to as they are being put into practice. The wonders of the slightest oversight can cause problems but I can attest to a before and after difference thanks for sharing.

The tips working well.. thanks

Hey,

I used the writeback stuff and so forth, tuned the fstab properly. I have a notebook with a CF flash card as a hd (x233 pretec).

Running Ubuntu 8.10.

I only tuned the hd stuff, but is there anything I should concider, having a CF card instead of a normal laptop HD ?

Cheers,

Yes don't do it. I have a high speed 16GB CF over IDE for fast boot usage (I use mirrored RAID XP for proper work). CF memory specialises at read and writing small files fast due to low latency (i.e. disk indexing/getting to content on the CF fast) but limited throughput (i.e. maximum speed). Caching the lot to write in one go will surefire bring your CF to a halt since it will simply queue up on the controller. Cached writing is ideal for hard disk use only since they are better at sequential writes as in theory* it dumps data consecutively using multiple heads at once. *Fragmentation and space availability affect disk location (and yes ext3 has this but it is dealt with at write time so you don't need to defrag like with FAT/NTFS filesystems). Oh and especially never defrag the CF if it is FAT or NTFS, as you'll fark the wear levelling algorithms that try to balance usage with wearing the memory out.

Now that I remembered something, you can always add "hpet=force" to grub's menu.lst default kernel line - it should allow for usage of hpet timer, a more precise and accurate timer clocksource, resulting in more efficient and exact preemption of tasks.

cheerS!

Could you write how to clean turn off this mods? I delete lines from this tutorial (before works for me all good) and now I have read only file system.
How to correct this?

DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT !!!!!! MESS WITH YOUR /ETC/FSTAB, it is incredibly dangerous to change to writeback mode on the fly and will in most cases result in the entire file system becoming read-only. xserver won't be able to start, you wont be able to run just about anything(fsck, gdm, sudo, etc). I am PISSED OF Marius, I just spent two hours trying to recover my system from your bad advice.

It worked for me and has also speeded up my system a fair bit. Perhaps different configurations respond in different ways, but it's great on my install :)

ubuntuuser: I am so sorry that you've spent two hours to recover your data. If it helps, I will try to post a video tutorial, so you can see that everything goes well and the filesytem will not become read-only if you do the /etc/fstab trick :)

Mr #32 - I havent the first clue about Ubuntu and manage to execute the tweaks suggested. Perhaps next time keep you lack of skills to yourself so that others dont have opportunity to ridicule you.

After applying these methods, my compiz will be turned off sometimes. Anybody knows what's going on? Thanks.

IT WORKED! i am running ubuntu ultimate edition 1.9 which used to take ages to boot up, now it takes aroung 30-45 seconds! THANKYOU!

This worked great for me, thanks! Ubuntu is booting in 24 seconds!

I have tried all the tweaks on an intel D945GCLF mobo running Ubuntu 8.10. I tried different convolutions with the tweaks and honestly found the concurrency=shell mod to /etc/init.d/rc to be the most useful. Finally able to take advantage of the CPU's hyperthreading BIOS option. Now both "cores" are being utilized. I haven't experimented with modifying the concurrency variable in /etc/default/rcS as anon suggested. Either way, well done Marius and linux noobs beware! You can really mess up your OS but you can always do a quick reload. thx.

I have installed ubuntu 8.04 in windows XP using 'wubi'.
I have done the below modification in '/etc/fstab', after that I hit with the error 'file not found'. Kindly help me in this regard. Thanks.

/ubuntu/boot/disks/root.disk ext3 noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback 0 1

For Sirajuddin: Where did you get /ubuntu/boot/disks/root.disk ? :) And why did you modified the /etc/fstab file?

That should be something like: /dev/sda1 ext3 noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback 0 1

But you have to know the location of the Ubuntu installation... the hard drive and partition (e.g. /dev/sda1 is the first partition on the first hard drive).

Hi Marius Nestor,

Thanks for your reply first of all. Actually I have installed ubuntu as application in Windows XP using 'wubi'. Hope you know how it will create the root disk.

I have re-solved the previous error 'file not found' by modifying the menu.lst file thru Windows XP. Now ubuntu booting, but the filesystem mounted in readonly mode & I can't edit any files even my ~home directory files too.

Now tell me how to recover the readonly filesystem in ubuntu. And one more wrong tweak I have done is:
sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /host/ubuntu/boot/disks/root.disk

Kindly help me.

Thanks in advance.

Siraj.

i did it and the system is fast.

thanks.

I have Linux Mint 6 Felicia. I have so far done tweak one and two in Step 2. I don't have dual-core processor or one that supports hyper-threading, so I haven't done tweak 3. My system is faster now. Thank you.

One minor comment. After reading "Linux: Replacing atime With relatime" (http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148) I decided to leave relatime in my fstab. It looks like this now: relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback

GREAT TIPS! I first made a mistake rebooting too soon after editing the fstab. Good thing I still have my live cd.. when I got back on track and followed the instructions, noticed great improvements on speed... Thanks for the great update! Your tutorial rocks!

I did all the above with the exception of the Hard drive tweaks.
I'm noticing increased speed, with opening files editing
and web browsing.

gedit and other editors still can take a 30 seconds to open
from a browser, which i find mysterious. i'm running postgresql
on this machine so that may be a performance hit right there,
likely best to make a server somewhere for that.

big thanks for the above, the HD tweaks will have to wait until
i've a more experimental box to play with the other tweaks though
helped things considerably.

Great tutorial man, I came across this when i had already broken my xserver by editing fstab only. Your simple instructions + LiveCD allowed be to boot back into a VERY responsive system. I should mention that I am using ext4 though :) I would also suggest BUM (boot up manager) to anyone looking to squeeze more performance out of their systems by disabling un-necessary processes.

Thanks Again.

Reynaldo.

This is a little stale but the advise seems to have worked fine for me.

I didn't notice any radical change in boot up times but I was already running with CONNCURENT=shell.

Regarding those people who had problems switching to a writeback journal... perhaps the buffers were out of sync. I don't know for a fact that this is necessary but I did a 'sync' first to make sure that the buffers were written to disk before ' tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda5'. I think that switching to a writeback cache on the fly should be safe after syncing because then the buffers should be empty.

In any case it worked for me and I did sync first.