Re: [gentoo-user] how to use RAM

["Stefan G. Weichinger" <lists@xunil.at>]

Joshua Murphy schrieb:

> Non-ricer? Well... this sorta breaks that category.

;-)

> There's a rather handy tool[1] already in the stage3, I've used it
> alongside bootchart to force-load everything needed into ram during
> boot, before it's needed, so execution gets held up by i/o just a
> little less. Actually shaved a few seconds off of my desktop's bootup
> once upon a time (3.0 GHz core 2 duo on 4GB of ram, which had
> excessive eyecandy while remaining fairly lightweight). The second use
> I put it through, and this one just a little more long-term useful,
> was preloading my wm, most of my home directory (primarily all the
> config files), aterm, firefox, a few other common tools I use, and the
> libraries they were using on my system while logging in. All of my
> applications were starting in no time at all. The catch... I took the
> brute force approach, rather than using an add-on tool to
> automagically choose what to prefetch for me. There are also setting
> in the bootscripts that, if you're not already using them, will make
> use of at least a little, using tmpfs here and there, and also just
> putting /tmp and /var/tmp onto tmpfs (outside of building things like
> open office, this tends to work well). Oh, and if you really do want
> to use up all that ram.... build openoffice in tmpfs... if it could
> use all 8GB for files only, it might actually work out, I know it
> kills off when you only have part of 4GB to feed it.
> 
> [1] artifice ~ # busybox readahead
> BusyBox v1.14.2 (2009-10-13 06:37:22) multi-call binary
> 
> Usage: readahead [FILE]...
> 
> Preload FILE(s) in RAM cache so that subsequent reads for thosefiles
> do not block on disk I/O

I use sys-apps/preload ... is this comparable?

I don't need to speed up boot-times as I use suspend-to-ram on my main
workstation as well, so I don't care much about booting ...

Thanks anyway for sharing! Stefan