What are your tips for improving overall system performance on ubuntu? Inspired by this question I realized that some default settings may be rather conservative on Ubuntu and that it's possible to tweak it with little or no risk if you wish to make it faster.
This is not meant to be application specific (e.g. make firefox load pages faster), but system wide.
Preferably 1 tip per answer, with enough detail for people to implement it.
A couple of mine would be:
- Install Preload (via Software Center or
sudo apt-get install preload); - Change Swappiness value – "which controls the degree to which the kernel prefers to swap when it tries to free memory";
What are yours?
PS: Since this is not intended to have a unique answer but rather, several useful tips, I'm making this community wiki out-of-the-box.
Best Answer
If you are "the average Joe", then just don't do anything. Don't fiddle with programs or settings which you don't understand. Don't follow tips posted on the Internet how to improve the performance of your system by compiling some software yourself or by installing a selfmade kernel.
Some of those tips may give you minor performance improvements indeed, but some of them will also give you a real headache, if you changed the wrong setting, disabled the wrong service, installed the wrong driver etc.
Therefore just be happy about your nicely running system. And BTW: Why would you need those 5 percent performance improvements? It will not lead to typing your office documents faster or editing your holiday photos in half the time.
And just to be clear: If you are not the average Joe, but a developer/hardcore gamer/... needing any cycle you can get, you are not the target of this comment...