Optimization

Outline

I have a fairly old laptop. It's a compaq R3000.
It's biggest issues that seem to impact performance are:
1. 512 MB ram.
2. 4800 RPM harddrive

Given this, I've found the following to be essential to making my Ubuntu experience workable.

Firefox tweaks

Firefox is a heavy on memory and I primarily use my laptop for browsing the web. So keeping it snappy is essential.
I am using Firefox 3.0 b5, but much of this should apply to others.
1. Install flashblock addon. Flash really slows down my system and some webpages are annoying enough to use flash for advertising or otherwise. Install flashblock and instead of a webpage immediately showing flash, you have to click a 'play' icon. This still allows you to use flash when you want to (games, facebook…)

2. Install Adblock plus addon. This blocks ads :) Now, I often have to right click on images directly to block an add. You have to be a bit smart about it from my perspective. For example try blocking the ads on facebook and you'll get some huge address like http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/438247238dasflkjadfjaldsfkjaasdfalsjdfkl :) Now you can learn to use wildcards. that's the * which means it will match anything. So i instead will edit the entry to show up as http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads*. This will block more ads in the future.

3. Reduce the cache size
Edit-preferences-advanced-network…change the offline cache to say 10MB

4. Reduce history
Edit-preferences-privacy….change keep history for say 5 days

5. Change the about:config settings
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(Firefox)

Follow the instructions here. Here are my settings
browser.cache.memory.capacity 4096
browser.cache.memory.enable true
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 1

Ubuntu tweaks

1. set the swappiness to a low value
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=0
or to set it permanently, edit the following file
sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf
and add this line
vm.swappiness=0

Now I use 0….meaning I don't want Ubuntu to do any swapping.
The default value is 60 I believe. So you might be comfortable with a lower value (20) or something.

You have to be careful with this though. By setting it to 0, Ubuntu is not going to swap any programs to disk. So this means, I have to actively make sure I don't have programs open that I am not using. I am comfortable with this as I do it anyways.
I found that leaving it at 60, I would have swapping happening all the time. With a 4800 RPM haddrive, it made firefo unusable.

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