[gentoo-performance] Speeding up program starts with squashfs

[Roman Zimmermann <mereandor@gmail.com>]

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deer, list!

I currently try to minimize the application startup-time for my gentoo-laptop. 
Even with prelink it takes about one minute to start kde and all programs in 
autostart due to the heavy disk i/o load.
In the last days I did some tests with taking a copy of my regular /usr (ext3) 
dir and storing it in a squashfs file. I then mount it as loopback device 
on /usr. (Leaving the original copy still intact but hidden.)

Those are the effects I try to achieve:
1. The filesystem has no fragmentation at all. Files in my regular /usr dir 
are somewhat fragmented, but not too badly.
2. It's compressed: less disk i/o and more cpu load.

So far the results have been promising. With the new squashfs I'm down to 
around 50 secs (-16%). But at the moment my benchmark methods are quite 
primitve. I simply have a stopwatch nearby and meassure the time from login 
to when the disk is idle again. I'm looking forward to some input on this.

greets
Roman

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