Debian Lenny - Some simple performance improvements
19 Dec 2008
After setting up my Eee PC on Debian and following the tips (see Lenny on Speed to maximise performance, I have found the same tips quite effective on other Debian systems. The key changes are as follows:
Add a ramdisk file system for /tmp
/etc/fstab:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
Add a ramdisk file system for /var/run and /var/lock
/etc/default/rcS:
RAMRUN=yes
RAMLOCK=yes
Add relatime option to hard disk file systems
Lastly, in /etc/fstab, add the following option to each hard disk based filesystem “relatime”. This is really important, as this stops the system from recording when a file was last read; without this option set, every time a file is read on your system, it is written to with the date last read - effectively changing a read into a read/write and thus slowing down the system. Adding the relatime option cuts this nonsense out and makes a surprising performance improvement.
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 errors=remount-ro,relatime 0 1
/dev/sda6 /home ext3 defaults,relatime 0 2
/dev/sda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
Using a faster system shell
By default, the standard system shell /bin/sh is provided by bash. Bash is very slow at start-up, because it does quite a lot of things before it starts to process shell statements. During boot-up, a lot of shell scripts are executed, and switching to a quicker shell has a noticeable impact. To switch /bin/sh to point at dash, install the package and use dpkg-reconfigure to enable it as the default system shell.
$ aptitude install dash
$ dpkg-reconfigure dash
Thanks to Debian Wiki for these tips.