In this article we will show you how you can boost the performance of your box running Fedora 10 and make it faster using a few simple tweaks. As always, we would always recommend you to back your system settings up so that in case of any inadvertant errors you can safely revert back to your old settings. This tweaks once applied will make your system less sluggish and faster. Here we go: If you are too lazy to go through the post below, you could try watching a screencast for this article here

Swappiness

Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the physical memory is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space. While swap space can help machines with a small amount of RAM, it should not be considered a replacement for more RAM. Swap space is located on hard drives, which have a slower access time than physical memory. But at times the Fedora system tends to use the Swap too, letting useful RAM cycles go waste, thus making the system unnecessarily slow. So, what you could possibly do is change how much swap space you use by changing the swappiness of your Fedora install. To do this add the following line with the number between 0-100.This value is 0 for NO Swap Usage and 100 for Full Swap Usage and depends on what your requirements are.

• Open the sysctl.conf file for editing and backup your previous sysctl.conf file

terminal#-] su -c 'cp /etc/sysctl.conf /etc/sysctl.conf.backup'

terminal#-] su -c 'gedit /etc/sysctl.conf'

• Add the following line

              vm.swappiness = 0

• Reboot your computer

Note: The value of vm.swappiness=0 states that no swap space will be used at all

Noatime

• Noatime affects how often the system updates your time in your computer. This is a significant loss in speed according to the
  kernel Devs.
  To speed it up do the following modifications.

• Edit your fstab file and back it up (Run following commands in the terminal)

               su -c 'cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup'
               su -c 'gedit /etc/fstab'

• Where the mount option says defaults you should append some more text.
• Before:

• After:

• Notice the only modification is to the lines that mount my default partitions. After the editing has been completed you will need to restart your computer for it to take effect. If you don't wish to reboot the computer, you may also remount the partitions of the live system.

Preload

Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon, that will monitor which programs you use most. Parts of these programs will be cached to speed up their load time. You can get it by running the following command in a terminal:

              su -c 'yum -y install preload'

After having installed it, remember to check if it's running and if it's enabled to start at boot time.
You may do this by going to System -> Administration -> Services and scrolling down to the "preload" entry: if it isn't checked, check it (click on the "Enable" button).
Check this link for further details.

Speed improvements using tmpfs filesystem

tmpfs
filesystem can be used for frequently use temp folders by add the following lines to /etc/fstab file

             tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
             tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

SCREENCAST: We have converted the entire article above into a screencast, See now! (In case you are unable to view the screencast below,
watch the video directly at http://blip.tv/file/1723669)

TIP: Check this post for a Firefox Improvement tweak which also makes use of the above Fedora Tweak!

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