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preload and e4rat

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 4:59 am
by georgebastille
Hi there, I am, as is so often the case, really enjoying my LMDE installation and I want to tweak it to make it better, faster, stronger etc. etc..

I found out a simple step which is supposed to look for patterns in your usage and preload the things you need into memory to make programs start faster, this is called preload. Instructions here e.g. http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic ... h-preload/

and then this morning I found e4rat
http://e4rat.sourceforge.net/

which looks awesome, it logs all the files read from your hard disk (not for use on SSDs) at boot, and then arranges them in order so your disk can read at maximum speed during boot whilst minimising seeking. It then 'preloads' these files using the command

Code: Select all

 init=/sbin/e4rat-preload 
as a kernel option.

My question is this, will these two interfere in a negative way?

Thanks

Re: preload and e4rat

Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2012 9:50 am
by Brian49
Just for information, the readahead-fedora package does the same job as e4rat, and does it with less fuss in my experience. Although it mainly aims to provide faster boot times, you can set the config so that the readahead daemon goes on collecting data for however long after bootup you choose, which goes some way to matching what preload has to offer.