The performance tag has no wiki summary.
14
votes
4answers
3k views
Is there a way to determine the optimal value for the bs parameter to dd?
On occasion I've seen comments online along the lines of "make sure you set 'bs=' because the default value will take too long," and my own extremely-unscientific experiences of, "well that seemed to ...
14
votes
10answers
3k views
the lightest way to have a GUI in Linux?
I have been using Gnome and KDE for a while, and I am now running Compiz standalone... Regarding system resource, I think the most heavy ones are feature-rich desktop environments (Gnome, KDE), then ...
11
votes
2answers
1k views
Measure pipe throughput in the shell
There is a shell command that allows to measure how fast the data goes through it, so you can measure the speed of output of commands in a pipe. So instead of:
$ somecommand | anothercommand
you ...
16
votes
4answers
6k views
How to speed up X over SSH on a slow network connection?
Are there any specific recommendations on speeding up X applications over ssh on a slow network connection? In this specific case, I am accessing a server located in west coast from a laptop in east ...
17
votes
2answers
515 views
Should I care about unnecessary cats?
A lot of command-line utilities can take their input either from a pipe or as a filename argument. For long shell scripts, I find starting the chain off with a cat makes it more readable, especially ...
8
votes
1answer
845 views
What's the progress regarding improving system performance/responsiveness during high disk I/O?
Whenever there is high disk I/O, the system tends to be much slower and less responsive than usual. What's the progress on Linux kernel regarding this? Is this problem actively being worked on?
24
votes
12answers
2k views
How can I tweak my Linux desktop to be more responsive?
I have the experience that Linux works fine until the physical memory is exhausted. As soon as swap space is used the performance is severely degraded and the GUI becomes unresponsive.
This problem ...
3
votes
1answer
1k views
LVM2 partition alignment
How to do the following with Linux tools :
LVM partition alignment and alignment of partition on LVM ?
What in case where I want to setup LVM partition (for "pv") and then partitions ?
To be more ...
3
votes
3answers
840 views
Fast way to build a test file with every second listed in YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format
I want to create a large test file with lines containg dates listed by the second, but my method is taking inordinately long... (or at least, that's how it feels :) ... 43 minutes to create only ...
2
votes
1answer
695 views
Interpreting tiobench results
I'm running tiobench on my raid1 and it gives me the following results.
Why is there ##### shown instead of throughput?
Why does seq.reading with 8 threads use 2836% CPU?
My results:
$tiobench
No ...
62
votes
7answers
9k views
Why use swap when there is more than enough RAM
Using swap space instead of RAM can drastically slow down a pc.
So why, when I have more than enough RAM available, does my Linux system (Arch) use the swap?
Checkout my conky output below:
...
26
votes
5answers
7k views
Can I configure my Linux system for more aggressive file system caching?
I am neither concerned about RAM usage (as I've got enough) nor about losing data in case of an accidental shut-down (as my power is backed, the system is reliable and the data are not critical). But ...
19
votes
3answers
977 views
How to limit resource usage to save CPU+RAM for a certain process?
I have a dev server on which sshd sometimes stops working because the machine runs out of RAM. Yes we are running low on memory and upgrading is not a feasible choice right now. What I want to do is ...
7
votes
1answer
933 views
How to make dpkg faster?
Package (un)installation on a Debian system is horribly slow, partly because it works with a whole bunch of (small) files. Short of getting a faster storage, how do I speed it up? I'm thinking maybe ...
9
votes
3answers
4k views
What is the most high-performance Linux filesystem for storing a lot of small files (HDD, not SSD)?
I have a directory tree that contains many small files, and a small number of larger files. The average size of a file is about 1 kilobyte. There are 210158 files and directories in the tree (this ...
8
votes
2answers
1k views
Heavy write activity on SSD nukes system performance
I've noticed that when I do heavy write applications, the whole system slows down. To test this further I ran this to do a (relatively) low-CPU, high disk activity:
john -incremental > file_on_SSD
...
6
votes
1answer
2k views
Using Linux cgroups to balance CPU performance
I have two dual-core Linux systems installed using Linux cgroups with relatively recent kernels; one is running Debian Squeeze, the other Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I've gotten CPU load balancing ...
4
votes
4answers
293 views
performance monitoring
Is there some performace monitoring tool which would run in background gathering info about all system activity? Somethimes my system (Arch linux, 32 bit) slows down terribly and the top utility ...
2
votes
1answer
2k views
Should I disable hyperthreading when concerned about performance of single-threaded applications?
I use a i5-2410M processor, which is setup to do hyperthreading by default on my laptop. Considering that this is a 2-core processor, this means it can do 4 threads at a time. This also means that ...
10
votes
1answer
477 views
How do I go about tracking down IO usage in Linux and other *nix OS'?
Occasionally, something on my system starts hammering the disk. I would like to log data that would let me know about I/O usage per process, then I could go back to it later and see what keeps doing ...
3
votes
2answers
619 views
Optimal SSD configuration
I am thinking about buying an SSD for my Debian system. However, because I don't know what is the optimal arrangement (i.e. what goes on the SSD), I am not sure what is the optimal size. Obviously I ...
3
votes
2answers
996 views
100.0%sy with poor disk performance
I have RHEL 5.4 kernel 2.6.18-164.el5 and I am experiencing very bad disk performance that happens randomly during working with Oracle.
Nothing appears in the logs.
When it happens, I see one CPU ...
1
vote
1answer
345 views
xorg performance in openoffice
I've just been monitoring my cpu usage in openoffice calc when cells have been copied vs when they haven't and seen a dramatic increase in cpu usage for the Xorg process. The additional rendering ...
0
votes
1answer
194 views
performance on Linux system when daisy-chaining multiple USB hard-drives on USB hubs?
What would the I/O access be like as I plug many USB drives into a Linux system with only 2 USB 2.0 ports and 1 USB 3.0 port? I expect I will have to have multiple levels of fan-out by plugging hubs ...
0
votes
1answer
113 views
What Linux tool will tell me if all the mounted disks share roughly the same bandwidth?
What Linux tool will tell me if all the mounted disks share roughly the same bandwidth? Can I do something like iostat for each of my /dev/sd* devices?
