Re: [gentoo-user] how to use RAM

[Joshua Murphy <poisonbl@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger <lists@xunil.at> wrote:
> 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
>
>

Yep! sys-apps/preload goes a long way to automate what I did with
busybox's readahead tool, and I'm about 99% certain they both make the
same system call to do the work anyways... it's all a matter of how &
where they get their list of *what* to fetch... I, as I said, took the
brute force approach and made my list by hand. ;-)

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy